Do Your Thing

So I walked onto that stage, in that jazz club in Berlin, curvy, brown, and American. When you show up like this in the world, the world has certain expectations. Strangers assume a certain sensuality, coupled with gospel emotional bombast. Somehow this is supposed to be inherent to me, biologically. This is just how it is being a singer in the world, while Black. 

By the time I got a chance to visit Germany, I’d been singing jazz for two decades. My father, a singer, introduced me to jazz when I was 7-years-old, and he began taking me to his gigs on the weekends. After a few months, I got up on stage with him. 

It was fine, being a seven-year-old, singing in bars on Hollywood Boulevard. I mean it was incredibly inappropriate, but it was an invaluable portal to my roots. I dove into Ellington, and Cole Porter, Lena Horne, and found a sense of myself in this old repertoire. Being mixed-race, my sense of ethnic identity could be elusive, but jazz is a heart tether to the bloodlines which created so much artistic depth in this country— and also created me. 

As a child, and up through my teens, I loved those rooms, filled with darkened faces. I loved feeling the void of expectation, because it was my adventure to fill it up with a story—and to sing that story any way I felt it. I truly met myself in those early years when I released my voice to crowd after crowd of strangers. 

As a little girl, it was my honesty and my skill which moved people—but as I matured, the world began to read me differently. When I was very young, I could just be a singer, then I had to be a female singer, then I had to be a Black, female singer. For instance, my voice is naturally soft, it has an airy quality, and tends towards a dark, round tone. However, at jam sessions and other gigs, I was expected to wail, to belt, to bring the house down. It’s an old stereotype. Many women are absolute killers at this type of singing, but not me. 

So, by my early twenties, I felt the limits of my place in the music world. Jazz is historic, and to be a jazz singer is to be, somewhat, an anachronism. My girlfriends in rock/punk bands could do whatever they wanted. Not only because that music is built on subversion and a certain amount of confrontation, but because they were my White friends. When you’re Black, or mixed-race, your race explains you first. I felt the mantle of Ella Fitzgerald in a satin gown, the conscious subtlety of the magnolia behind Billie Holiday’s ear—all of this beauty and class is a wonderful legacy, but also a kind of cultural responsibility. My White girlfriends did not have to answer for their culture in every note—they had a freedom of self-expression that I did not have, neither artistically nor visually. 

You’re going to tell me there are exceptions. Of course, there are, now more than ever. For example, contemporary with the epic women I mentioned above, we had Nina Simone who could arguably be described as quite punk in her sheer power and unapologetic execution of her message. However, for many of us, our paths in music and in presence, have been very prescriptive. 

When I turned 28, and got a chance to go to Germany, I wanted to see if I could show up someplace completely different and be someone completely different – someone completely my own. I told my dad about my plans, and he was concerned, because he’s a parent, but he was also excited for me. 

“Be careful.” He warned. “But be yourself.” 

Easier said than done, but that was the idea. 

I called one of my uncles, a jazz flautist, who’d moved to Europe about two decades before. He’d spent time in Germany, and he told me about this one particular spot in Berlin, where the band was made up, primarily, of American ex-pats. He said he’d mention me to the woman who ran the club. 

And he did. 

I arrived at the club in Berlin, and an Asian woman received me in the entry way. This woman was striking, in a long dress and a shawl, looking like a time traveler from the 1930’s with modern minimalist accents. She spoke perfect English with a German lilt and showed me to the foot of the stage where I could meet the band. 

The room dimmed into Cognac and glass. As the band began their instrumental set, I looked across the large space to the windows above the stage. It was still dusk, just light enough to see the outside plaza, inset with plaques about WWII. Germany does not hide its history, but grapples with it, in plain sight. When I’d first arrived in the country, a few days before, locals greeted me with a calm hospitality. But underneath that, Berlin felt like a place full people consciously building upward from a ghastly silence. The streets were full with folks going about their days in scarves; there were tourist buses, and corporate coffee houses, and the remains of Hitler’s residence, and lit windows embedded in the cement of a plaza in recognition of the Holocaust, then a Starbucks, and Thai restaurant. All in the flow of life. “Raya! Come on up!” 

I blinked back into the present tense. The band had finished their instrumental set, time to sing. 

So I walked onto that stage, in that jazz club in Berlin, curvy, brown, and American. I’d decided on either “There is no Greater Love” or “Autumn Leaves.” Two absolute standards that any jazz ensemble will know. The stage was about five feet off the ground, unusually high, which exaggerated the alien feeling between me and the crowd. The bandleader, an American ex-pat with approximately my latte in his skin color, greeted me warmly. We went with “Autumn Leaves,” a ballad. I suggested we start with a duet between me and the bass player, and the rest of the band could enter on the second verse section. The bandleader agreed with that, 

“Great we’ll do once through like that, then you can do your thing.”

I mentally tripped on that for a second “Do my thing? What thing? What did he mean?” I couldn’t ask, because the bass player had begun, and it was my time to sing. 

“Autumn Leaves” began – smooth, murky, and delicate; it was the energy I’d been hoping for. The band was listening to my interpretation, giving me the musical space to sculpt a story from the words and linger in the emotion. This is where I want to live creatively, in this dynamic, beyond cultural expectations—where it’s me and these faces, all in one experience, telling a story and receiving a story. 

As I breathed out the final lines: 

“I’ll miss you most of all, my darling, when Autumn Leaves start to fall.” I felt a trance hanging in the atmosphere, the spell I’d wanted to create. It was a pure spell, like the darkened club rooms where I sung in my childhood. I was so grateful. I finished my final note, and listened, expecting the pianist to close out the song, but that did not happen. Instead, the bandleader launched into a whirlwind drum fill. I twisted my head around to look at him. The bass player jumped into a groove, knowing exactly where this was going – then the piano player jumped in with an unmistakable fast church rhythm. Oh no, it was happening again. I was getting railroaded into a gospel breakdown section—this is what he had meant by “You can do your thing…” I had just gotten through the most intimate version of a ballad, but none of that mattered because it had been decided before I ever opened my mouth, that eventually I would be energetically riffing over a raucous gospel jam. Because look at me, that must be “my thing.” So I jumped in. I was part of the band, and when you sit in, you serve the whole. The house band knew what to do – the energy got the whole club lifted, and hey, I put on a show. 

After my tune, I thanked the band, and I left the stage with good energy. The woman who met me at the entrance was glowing, saying I could come back any time, and I thanked her and said I would. I left, proud to have jumped in, and honestly amused at the burden of misperception. I didn’t feel bad, I felt half-seen, which is not nothing. I suppose I felt appreciated as an idea. 

When I got back to the States, my dad asked me how it was. I told him about the sights, and the music. I told him about the inspiring moment, and the disappointing outcome. He laughed a little at his idealistic daughter, impatient to be understood in ways she herself did not fully understand. My father knew full well that to be a Black musician in America, or anywhere in the world, is a jigsaw of personal ideals within a historical mold. He also knew that I could only understand this in time.