Nestled confidently between jazz and R&B, her album The Mosaic Project was at turns brainy, sassy, soulful and revolutionary - rather like the women it celebrated. Fittingly, "Transformation," a cover of the Nona Hendryx track sung by Hendryx herself, set the tone for drummer Terri Lyne Carrington's formidable convention of female musicians. An equally appropriate word might be transformation: Each player comes to the gig with her arsenal of licks and voicings, but when the tune starts it's all about reacting to and being inspired by one another, giving each other space to create and shaping the simultaneous offerings into a transmuted whole.
Some will say jazz, in a word, is improvisation. She taught an entire generation of us to persevere, to know our stuff - and yes, to know our worth. And when we listen to them, we should take care to remember the story of the young woman who made them. The album's most enduring songs, "Fallin'," and "A Woman's Worth," are perfect. A classically trained pianist raised on hip-hop in Hell's Kitchen, Keys took varied influences - including Chopin (her favorite composer), Marvin Gaye, Billie Holiday - and, with them, crafted a distillation of her spirit. 1 on the Billboard charts and secured Keys' position as one of the most visionary composers of her time. So she left and released Songs In A Minor with Arista Records. When she took her finished records to Columbia, they didn't like them. 'Little girl, sit over there in the corner.' Them being attracted to me, whatever, 'Little girl let's go to the movies, let's go to dinner.'" Keys couldn't work under those conditions, so she found a Queens basement and made her own studio there. As she told The New York Times in 2002: "So I'm working with them, and them being not receptive to the fact that I play. Like many black women artists who came before and after her, she had to contend with people who lacked respect for her as a creator and a person.
But she decided to pursue a future with a different Columbia instead - Columbia Records, the label who signed her at age 15. Ann Powers (NPR Music)Īlicia Keys graduated from high school at age 16 with a scholarship to Columbia University. Some male critics found The Roches startlingly intimate, but in its wryness and honesty, many women heard exactly what they were thinking. His decision to mix these songs "in audio verité," so that everything in the speaker hit the ear with equal weight, was inspired by the way the sisters made their music, sitting in that consciousness-raising formation and vocalizing into each other's faces. Art-rock guitarist Robert Fripp produced The Roches, and is often credited for its uniquely intimate feel. Self-written songs about pregnancy, work, family tensions, complex love and the feminine mystique gained clarity from the utterly clear, deliberately imperfect harmonies The Roches had mastered singing holiday carols in the street. It became a cult hit, turning Maggie, Terre and Suzzy Roche - New Jersey-raised siblings who embodied both cultural feminism and Greenwich Village boho cool - into sneaker-clad heroines of the folk scene. The self-titled 1979 debut album by The Roches made consciousness-raising into music. These simple acts of consciousness-raising were fundamental to second-wave feminism, throwing the light of everyday experience upon the false structures of sexism. In the late 1970s, women across America sat in circles, speaking and listening intently.