Dallas-raised singer Jazzmeia Horn hopes she’ll be clutching her first Grammy Award when she leaves the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Jan. 26. But if the scat-singing prodigy goes home empty-handed, it’s no big deal.
After losing the golden gramophone trophy in 2018, Horn was secretly relieved.
“I’m actually happy I didn’t win the Grammy Award. … I’ll have my time,” she told us in August, shortly before the release of her second album, Love and Liberation.
“You have to build a foundation first before you can build a house, or the house will just crumble. I’m exactly where I need to be right now. There’s no rush.”
At 28, Horn is putting the finishing touches on that groundwork. As jazz critic Giovanni Russonello put it last August in The New York Times, “Love and Liberation cements her as the next big carrier of straight-ahead jazz’s vocal tradition.”
Despite Jazzmeia’s name, jazz wasn’t her first choice in music. She grew up singing gospel at Dallas’ Golden Chain Missionary Baptist Church. As a teen, she rocked hard in a garage band, singing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and songs by the metal band System of a Down.
She finally fell in love with jazz while attending Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, after teacher Roger Boykin slipped her a mix CD filled with jazz vocal greats. By the time she got to a song by Sarah Vaughan, the match was lit.
"I was like ‘Whoa!’ She was scatting and improvising. ... I’d never heard anything like that before. It knocked my socks off,” Horn told The Dallas Morning News in 2017.
She dove headfirst into jazz, studying it at the New School in Manhattan and spending most of her free time in the city’s famed jazz clubs. In 2015, she won the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and landed a deal with Concord Music Group, which released her 2017 debut album, A Social Call on its Prestige label.
Rave reviews for the album and her freewheeling singing fueled demand for her concerts, and she soon found herself crisscrossing the U.S., Europe, South America and Asia. A Social Call was nominated by the Grammys for best jazz vocal album, and in 2018, Horn performed a fiery version of the Art Blakey classic “Moanin’” at the Grammy pre-show concert.
But the trophy went instead to Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Dreams and Daggers. Undaunted, Horn went back to work, recording Love and Liberation, which features eight original tunes.
She faces stiff competition for this year’s jazz vocal album Grammy, especially from Esperanza Spalding, a Grammy favorite since winning the best new artist award in 2010. But even if voters don’t hand Horn the trophy, critics have already deemed Love and Liberation one of 2019’s best jazz albums, singling out Horn’s songwriting for praise.
“Her tunes are so good, other singers are sure to try them on, but then they’ll have to sing them as well as Jazzmeia Horn does. Her interpretations set a standard of their own,” Kevin Whitehead said on NPR’s Fresh Air.
When she plays Thursday night in Denton, expect the New York-based Horn to mix her own tunes with jazz standards and a cover of “Green Eyes” by her fellow Booker T. Washington graduate Erykah Badu. Boykin, the Booker T. teacher, performs as a special guest and will welcome his former student back to town for her first Dallas-Fort Worth show since A Social Call came out in 2017.
“The core of my community — all these people that knew me when — they’ve never seen me onstage,” Horn told us last summer.
Glory and fame are fleeting. But Horn’s voice and talent are likely to sustain a long, vibrant career in jazz or whatever genre she chooses.
Details
Jazzmeia Horn performs Thursday, Jan. 23, at Texas Woman’s University’s Margo Jones Performance Hall, 1100 Oakland St., Denton. Shelley Carrol and the Roger Boykin Quartet open the show at 7 p.m. www.prekindle.com
