Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Journeywoman (2023) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

Born in Chicago and living in Durham, North Carolina, Dr. Lenora Zenzalai Helm has been called a "voice of her generation" and a "national treasure" by Jazziz magazine.

She is a top-notch jazz vocalist, an exuberant composer, an inventive lyricist, an inspiring bandleader, and a dedicated teacher at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). On her new recording, Journeywoman, recorded with her Tribe Jazz Orchestra® Nonet, Helm brings together all the inventions and dimensions of jazz and the African diaspora. Helm's new CD, her eighth as a leader, is a compelling 65-minute, multi-movement, 12-track work in which she sings about the life of an allegorical woman named Journey, her struggles with abuse, birth, death, self-definition, and her victories through self-love, perseverance and affirmation.

"The songs are about a lot of women we know," Helm says. "Journeywoman is the archetypal woman, every woman. So the stories that are in it happened to someone you know, once or twice removed, or to yourself, in all the ways that the lyrics unfold."

Helm originally composed Journeywoman, released on her Zenzalai Music Records label in 2022, in 2003 for a commission as part of Chamber Music America's New Jazz Works grant funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (the first African-American vocalist to receive such a grant), and over the next two decades she added to and arranged the work until it reached its current form. "It took me 20 years to really sing all the music," Helm explains, "because when I wrote it, it was fresh. But as the woman I am now, I can really express and sing the music."

Formed in 2019, Helm's Tribe Jazz Orchestra® is a harmonically nuanced and rhythmically nimble nine-piece nonet composed of several NCCU faculty and local musicians, including pianist Ernest A. Turner, II, guitarist Baron Tymas, bassist Natalie Boeyink, drummer Thomas E. Taylor, Jr, tenor saxophonist/spoken word artist Salome Serena Wiley Bey, soprano/alto saxophonist/flutist Dexter Moses, trumpeter Al Strong, trombonist Robert Trowers and cellist Timothy Holley. "I love the musicians here in the Southeast, where I live," Helm notes, "because they have this combination of the influence of the church and the whole (Afro)diasporic value in their approach to everything they play."

TRACKLIST

1. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Earth Transitions 1
2. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Beauty
3. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Tears Are a River That Take You Someplace
4. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Huntress Too
5. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Sweet Sixteen
6. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Stay Out
7. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Baby Knows A Secret
8. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Sister Joy
9. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Divine One
10. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Full Knowing
11. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Earth Transitions II
12. Lenora Zenzalai Helm - Journeywoman



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