“The lockdown happened and Breonna Taylor was shot down in her home. And I felt like if Imma do a remix album, I only want to do songs that were done by Black women.”
Don’t Let Her Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone’s Legacy as a Revolutionary Composer Across Time and Space
Melanie Charles’ latest project, Y’all Don’t (Really) Care About Black Women, is an 11-track album of imagination and exploration of the Black female jazz archive that often obscures Black women's contributions. Charles develops her own jazz canon, featuring tunes made by or popularised by Black women. She remixes the work to take on different tones and styles while still retaining and honouring the mode of jazz. On Y’all Don’t (Really) Care About Black Women, you will hear songs like “God Bless the Child”, a well-known Billie Holiday classic, reimagined in a Prince-like style, where Charles utilises electric drums to stretch the dramatics of the song, putting its range, meaning and depth on display. The other women Charles honours and remixes on the EP are Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Betty Carter, Marlena Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald, and Abbey Lincoln.
For Charles, who is of Haitian descent and Brooklyn, New York-raised, music has always been a part of her life. There is no distinguishable moment where she felt she “chose” it. Charles grew up learning piano at the Holy Trinity Baptist Church in Brooklyn and continued performing throughout her life. She went to LaGuardia for high school, with a focus on opera, singing challenging and classic standards like Mozart’s “Queen of the Night aria” and often winning vocal and opera competitions.
When opera no longer became Charles’ career goal, she pivoted to jazz and attended the New School in New York. It was here that she met an array of influential collaborators and teachers, all of which ultimately opened up invaluable doors for Charles. Some of these doors included touring globally with Laura Izibor and opening for artists like Maxwell and John Legend, playing the flute for SZA on SNL. This year, she was also invited to sing with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.
An important component of Charles’ work has been recognising the role the music has played and continues to play in Black culture.
“You know, jazz was initially pop music. And once I started, once I got into really studying the history of jazz, it was no longer popular. By the time I got around studying it, it was heavily institutionalized. It was refined to sit-down music. So once I got into the history of it, I told myself that I am going to. I am committed to um. I'm committed to. bringing back that same energy, so that's why I came up with the idea of Make Jazz Trill Again to bring it back to the street, bring it back to us, make it accessible to us again.”
Charles formalised this pursuit by creating a project called "Make Jazz Trill Again" in 2016, which is an ethos that reclaims jazz from white, classed and patriarchal iterations of the style. Jazz music is intimately linked to how Black people have expressed sadness, complexity, joy, anticipation, affirmation, stillness, and rage. In Angela Davis' book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, she explores how blues, a genre that could be considered the cousin to jazz, was an avenue for Black women to break from the heavily imposed respectability politics of the early and mid 20th century in the US. Further, James Baldwin emphasised in his book, The Fire Next Time, the complexity of jazz, how it does not sound "happy" or "sad", and that such categorisations are not just limiting but rooted in whiteness and reductiveness. Lastly, Amiri Baraka also wrote extensively about jazz, covering the irony of its gentrification, the range needed to understand and critique it, and focusing fundamentally on the why - why do we make this music? What does jazz say about the depths and experiences and minds of Black people? With all this in mind, the jazz canon is a rich place to go to and work from.
Y'all Don't (Really) Care About Black Women is the second of Charles' solo releases. Her first EP, Girl with the Green Shoes, was released in 2017. If you search for Melanie's name online or in music venues archives, there are numerous performances at prestigious venues and cultural centres, including her NPR Tiny Desk Concert, released this year.
“Men in jazz are musicians, while women in jazz who are vocalists just get called singers. We’re not met with the same level of respect for musicianship”
Also happening this year, Charles was approached by her now label Verve to do a remix album after they heard her version of "How Glad I Am", by Nancy Wilson. Charles decided to take this opportunity, which was an extraordinary one, given how difficult it can be to independently clear or pay for the legal rights to use classic songs, to make a record that would be dedicated to the unsung labour of Black women. Charles said this was a reflection she meditated on in the midst of the killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020 and the repercussions of COVID-19 lockdowns that deeply affected Black communities.
Charles made her selection of songs very intentionally and chose women whom she described as self-possessed and "bad-ass".
"I love Sarah Vaughan. I mean, she was one of my first [loves]. It was Sarah and Ella [Fitzgerald] who were the first two that I fell in love with. So I knew I wanted to do songs interpreted by them. Marlena Shaw has always represented, like, grown folks music to me. She always had the sexy type of thing going on. And I was really excited when I saw that on the catalog that I could imagine something by Abbey Lincoln."
The music stylings are informed by Charles' interest in nostalgia and how that can be an entry point for audience interest and her canvas for creation. She says that many of the songs we love are nostalgic, that they hold a potency and can take on meaning through cultural moments. She wanted to pick well-known classics but perform them in completely new ways.
For example, the lead single and video of the EP, "Woman of the Ghetto (Reimagined)", originally by Marlena Shaw, has a smooth and sultry rendition that differs from Shaw's punchy recordings. This rhythmic choice rhymes with Charles' political choice of making Woman of the Ghetto the lead single. Charles said the lyrics of the song, released in 1969, still apply today.
"Woman of the Ghetto says, 'How do you raise your kids in the ghetto? Do you feed one child or starve another? My children learn the same as yours, you know?' This pandemic that we're in, a lot of the conversation was that because children were not allowed to go to school, a lot of them were missing out on meals. And that was really a thing that you saw, something I saw. And so I felt like Woman of the Ghetto literally was a reflection of what we've been experiencing for the last 80 years"
When one continues to go through the tracklist of Y'all Don't (Really) Care About Black Women, a rich tapestry emerges, one that maps and celebrates the history of Black women in jazz. Charles pointed out that our (Black) imagination of jazz music is oversaturated with men; the names Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Louis Armstrong often come to mind as "the greats". However, people like Lucille Armstrong, whom Charles dedicated a project to with the invitation of the Louis Armstrong House years ago, aren't remembered as clearly. This is despite Lucille Armstrong's labour in aiding her husband's touring and managing finances being integral to the success of his career.
In this same vein, Charles pays homage to people like Betty Carter on the EP. Carter was a jazz vocalist and musician from Flint, Michigan, whose influential career spanned from the early 1950s into the 1990s. She was inspired by bebop and put her own style on scatting. In addition to her work successfully touring and performing around the country, Carter was also dedicated to the career-building of fellow jazz musicians. She created a programme in 1993 called Jazz Ahead, which served to mentor young jazz artists. Five years later, Jazz Ahead became hosted by the Kennedy Center through a partnership with Carter and continues to run to this day. Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead programme is considered a distinguished residency for pre-professional musicians in the genre, all at no cost to the artists. Legacy's like Carter are invaluable and a part of a long and unsung history of Black women making space for themselves and numerous others to continue to create culture and community for Black artists and people.
"Men in jazz are musicians, while women in jazz who are vocalists just get called singers. We're not met with the same level of respect for musicianship. And so, the truth is that it's the women in the community that are silently responsible for sustaining this culture."
The joy of Charles' music and being witness to her performance comes from the fun of her ability to improvise. This isn't to say that, in a literal sense, Charles' work is improvisational, but rather, because of her deep knowledge and love of Black music and culture from different parts of the world, there is a sense of excitement and fun to see how she uses, references, reimagines, and creates new content from Black archives. Some of the best fun comes from playing around because you have put in the time to become skilled. Charles' music allows us to, as Maya Angelou once said, indulge “in the silliest things and be very, very serious”.
Charles’ work also has a spiritual component, whether it be her morning ritual, which sometimes includes chanting, or her approach to yoga instruction. A through-line for her is the celebration and utilisation of Black music culture, including style and practice from her family’s home country of Haiti. Charles notes that the connotations of Haiti are singular or overly reductive in conjuring up ideas of corruption and politics only. Through her work, she says she also wants to champion the rich artistry of Haiti, recognising that liberation and a people are made up of many different things, and culture and artistry are key components.
Charles plans to perform the album following its releases and even create different live renditions of the work, as the nature of the EP itself is heavily produced. Ultimately, Charles hopes to invite people into the legacy of Black women artists.
“I just hope that I bring in a different audience to research and get to know Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln. I think the title is provocative. I think it's going to grab people when they see it and ask, ‘What is this about?’ You know, so I hope that it serves as a sort of bait. And then once we get people to tap into it, I hope that it encourages them to look into this music more and build a relationship to jazz and to their own relationship to the music.”
You can follow Melanie on Instagram @melaniecharlesisdflower.
Y'all Don't (Really) Care About Black Women is available to stream and buy from 12th November 2021.