Judi Jackson interview: Jazz music was my escape

Judi Jackson was 14 years old, living with her adoptive parents in Roanoke, Virginia, unofficial capital of the Blue Ridge Mountains, when a box of CDs arrived in the post.

Inside were recordings by some of the greatest jazz divas ever, their voices telling of lives lived, battles fought, stories demanding to be heard — Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone, who invested the African-American spiritual Sinnerman with a passion and fury the young Jackson, a keen chorister, had never encountered at church.

“Nina was fierce,” says Jackson, 25, sitting upstairs in an east London member’s club, reed-slim in black jumper and jeans, a patterned scarf restraining her Afro.

“She went to places in her music that most artists only dream about.”

The CDs were a gift from world-renowned trumpeter and bandleader Wynton Marsalis, whom Jackson had met backstage after his concert at Virginia’s famed performance space, the Jefferson Center, where she told him she wanted to become an artist who pushed boundaries, who people would remember.

At that time, Jackson was honing her skills in Music Lab, the Center’s lauded youth programme. Just two years later, having studied Holiday’s distinctive, horn-like phrasing and Fitzgerald’s easy knack for scat singing, she was opening for rhythm and blues and gospel legend Mavis Staples. Aged 18, at university on a music theatre scholarship, Jackson teamed up with hipster fusionists Snarky Puppy to record her own song, Only You, for their Grammy-winning 2013 album Family Dinner: Volume One.

“I had no backing singers like the other lead vocalists,” she says in her intense yet upbeat way. “We had a tiny rehearsal, then did it in one take.”

In the same way, the 14 tracks of Jackson’s debut album Live in London were captured in a single swoop last June at the Theatre Royal Stratford East — where she was starring in Café Society Swing, about the first racially desegregated jazz club in New York. Backed by an 11-piece band of UK-based hotshots including trumpeter Jay Phelps and pianist Sarah Tandy, Jackson dazzled in a red turban and backless red gown, variously pacing the stage barefoot to deliver her interpretation of Sinnerman; accompanying herself on keys for an intimate original, With You; standing at the mic to sing Better in the Fall, a tune she wrote after relocating to London in autumn 2017.

“I have a nomadic instinct,” says Jackson, who has just dropped her bags at home in Notting Hill after a sold-out European tour. “I grew up going from place to place; for me it was an adventure. As an adult this means I never get stuck, either in location or in heartbreak.”

A self-confessed “old soul”, Jackson sings it like she’s lived it — which as it turns out, she has. Hers is the stuff of biopics and blues songs. The only daughter of a poet/academic mother and a musician/historian father, ex-army, who met in a mental rehabilitation facility and split soon after Judi was born, she watched her beautiful, fragile mother endure a subsequent abusive relationship, and suffered herself.

She says: “He was a church pastor, quite insane, who, when I was eight had my long hair cut off to stop me being vain, and hung my toys from the ceiling so I couldn’t reach them. After he started beating me based on Jesus’s lashings in the Bible we ran away.”

Mother and daughter were in and out of women’s shelters. “At the Salvation Army I’d play piano and sing to cheer people up,” she says. “Music was my escape.”

Aged 12, Jackson was thriving at school, cast as the lead in the Christmas musical, when news came that her mother’s mental health had deteriorated, and that she needed to be hospitalised. “I went for a sleepover at my best friend Ashley’s house, and her parents, who are the sweetest people ever, decided to take me in.”

There were music lessons — Jackson also plays guitar and xylophone — and a long stint in the church choir, which her adoptive mother coached. Then came Music Lab and living in halls at university (“I had to get away to evolve as an artist”). At her graduation, her favourite music teacher predicted that Jackson would one day be regarded as a great jazz diva.

Remembering this, Jackson flashes a grin. “This got me thinking,” she says. “So I moved to New York and landed a job at Jazz at Lincoln Center” — whose artistic director happens to be Wynton Marsalis — “then got a residency singing jazz in Doha, Qatar, where I met my British manager.”

Throughout her first year in London, between starring in popular tribute shows to Amy Winehouse and indeed, to Nina Simone, and covering standards such as Blame it on My Youth, the title of her 2017 EP, Jackson was writing and performing original material influenced by folk, soul and pop as well as jazz. Her anthemic tune Worth It, a silky ode to self-esteem, has notched up more than 126,000 hits on Spotify.

“I wrote it to remind myself and others, especially in a big city like London, to shrug off fear, stick to your story, stay on track. I say it ain’t easy but believe me, it’s worth it.”

She pauses and smiles. “It really is,” she says.

Judi Jackson plays the Purcell Room, SE1 (efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk) on Saturday November 17