WHO IS YAHZARAH

YAHZARAH

THE CEREMONY

If the definition of the word “ceremony” entails adhering to life’s “protocols,” facing challenges with “ritual observance” and celebrating the realization of dreams as if a “formal or solemn rite,” then spectacularly talented, singer/songwriter/producer YAHZARAH has been nothing less than ceremonious in adhering to the pomp and circumstance of life.  “When I was born, I had a naming-ceremony,” the five-octave natural soprano explains, “and [you know] when you’re born into Yoruba they put your feet on the ground and the ancestors tell them what you’re going to do with your life. And it was said that I would be a musician…that I would be a muse and that I would travel the world blessing the world with music.”  While the revered African custom proved pointedly life-prophesizing, allowing for her gift and passion to lead her from promisingly talented youngster to a wildly exposed and accomplished music powerhouse in young adulthood, the powerhouse talent would find herself subsequently standing in ceremony through the varying occurrences life brings.  Hence, the succinctly appropriate title of her curiously-anticipated, seven-years-in-the-making fifth set, The Ceremony.

“I recognize that the way I create is that I take my time,” YAHZARAH explains, while on the topic of The Ceremony and the long hiatus between LPs.  “So it took me seven years because of survival, and some of it was that I had to actually experience the things that would birth these songs. I was in transition , so it couldn’t have happened all at once.”  For the multi-talented young woman, this meant balancing what seemed like a steady-rising career of tour dates and recording sessions with her innate aspiration for and assumed responsibility of being a good wife and mother.  Unbeknownst to her, as the ceremony of life would have it, shortly following the release of her potentially breakthrough-worthy fourth set, The Ballad of Purple St. James, YAHZARAH experienced the break-up of her marriage, learned she was pregnant with her son and had a painful parting of ways with her musical family and  collaborators, The Foreign Exchange Music, all of which resulted in a ceremony of harsh reality.  Trying to pursue my own dreams for myself while attempting to balance being someone’s wife and trying to find myself in between this,” she shares.  “So that was a very tough time and I had to make some very serious decisions about what I was going to do next.”  While her instincts and survival mode kicked in, resulting in her jumping back on the road for live shows with her son in tow a mere four weeks after giving birth, she fully realized that her music aspirations weren’t likely to come to fruition for a single musician mother living in Durham, North Carolina.  “So I decided to plan my exit,” she recalls; “I was going to leave North Carolina and go to New York to live with my baby. So what I did was announce it to everybody that I was going to do my farewell show, I did that last show and over a couple of months I moved myself to New York.”  With unwavering focus, she proceed to setting up shop in her sometimes harsh new surroundings and obtaining a real estate license, while her  son stayed in her native D.C. with her mother.  Everything seemed to be coming together with her new life, though YAHZARAH found that she was (creatively) dying inside.  Though she had made the transition from a creative profession to a great day job with a reputable real estate company with ease, living a life she hadn’t quite set out for began taking its toll.  “All these years later – when my only goal in life was to be a wife, mother and musician – to not be a wife, to barely be a musician and to barely be seeing my child was a very helpless feeling,” she recalls.  I really had to make a decision to believe in my choice to come to NY being part of my story and that I couldn’t fail.”  As fate and her then current ceremony in life would have it, her ex-husband – having heard of her struggle in balancing work and motherhood – stepped in with a plan to take their two and a half years-old son Miles full-time while she re-dedicated herself to music-making. “It allowed me to dig my heels into the moment that I was in,” the she offers.  “Sometimes it’s bout blooming where you’re planted, so I started to really try to find enjoyment in selling houses and helping people find homes to live in. And in the meantime, I just started making music with the hopes that I would finish a record.”  Not too long afterwards, while casually attending a jam session at the Village Underground in New York City’s West Village, she made the acquaintance of noted keyboardist/songwriter/record producer Ray Angry, who worked with the likes of Joss Stone, Lauren Hill, Solange, Elvis Costello, and The Roots.  It didn’t take much time for him to decide he wanted to work with her after hearing her dynamic voice.  “We’d known each other through the circle for years, but that evening I sang.  And he was like ‘Yo, let’s get in the studio!’”  With that, in between showing houses and meetings, YAHZARAH and Ray Angry took to the studio and hit it on the nose right from the start. “The first song we wound up doing together was ‘Beautiful Ashes,’ which was very powerful for me because he and I had been working on another piece while making the record. To say that there was something that broke inside of me and allowed me to kind of drain “out the pain”is an understatement. Without it, there would be no [The] Ceremony. It is the first song of a number would assist me in announcing to myself that it was time to let go of the past along with the bitterness and disappointment attached to it…so I could really simply be free. There were valuable lessons in there that I wouldn’t get to if I was still stuck to the details of the journey.

Then again, from the perspective of either a fan or even the casual observer YAHZARAH had been wearing her crown all along.  Despite the twists and turns of life standing in ceremony can bring, from an outsider’s view, she’s been on a roll from the precocious 7 year-old singing in the choir of her native Washington. D.C. church and graduating from the city’s prestigious Duke Ellington School of the Arts, to attending North Carolina Central University on a full jazz program scholarship and landing her first music industry gig as background vocalist for Erykah Badu in 2001. Years of listening to and being influenced by Prince, Aretha Franklin, Terrance Trent D’Arby, and rock music icons like Madonna, Kate Bush, Tina Turner, Grace Jones and David Bowie; While in highschool at Duke Ellington YahZarah would become a member of a group called “ENTYME” with some students at Howard University their Musical mentorship helped her write some of her fist songs, and her connection to one of the groups members Geno Young would not only led to her his calling her to audition for a background gig with Badu, but soon resulted in her becoming one of the major arrangers of five songs on Erykah Badu’s third major release “Mama’s Gun” appearing in music videos (Badu’s “Bag Lady”), touring as an opening act (for Badu’s Mother’s Gun Tour) and releasing her Hear Me debut disc.  By 2003, though she was already signed to a different label (Three Keys Music) with whom she released her sophomore set (Blackstar), it was obvious that she was still in the “paying dues and lessons-learned” phase of her career. “Blackstar is the perfect example of what happens to somebody when label step in, get in your skin and take all the pieces that make you, you away,” YAHZARAH recollects.  “If you want a company to respect who you are, it’s best to come with your message strong in advance of dealing with them. I didn’t know who I was, so they had the opportunity to walk in and tell me when and where to enter.”  YahZarah still managed to become an Essence Magazine “woman to watch” and chart billboard as an independent artist Hence, amidst touring with big-name acts (Bilal Oliver /The Roots/Anderson Paak/J Davey/Q-Tip, Chaka Khan ), collaborating with her peers (“Come to Me ” w/ Raheem Devaughn,  The Foreign Exchange “Connected” her song “Sincere” on the project made “BBC Song of the Year”), the 2006 EP The Prelude was a self released project and 2010’s The Ballad of Purple St, James would garner her Grammy consideration in 6 different categories was released through The Foreign Exchange Music with whom she would unceremoniously part ways.

With challenges and experiences behind her, YAHZARAH approached the recording of her new music with Ray Angry with renewed optimism and patience, holding tight to her instinct and faith in what the stars had aligned for her…I trust the process and  recognize that my gift is not my own and that everything will fall into place as it should,” she imparts.  “So I knew in my mind that we were recording an album. But I knew it would take time.” With that confidence and good creative energy surrounding her, a call seemingly came out of nowhere that funk-rock superstar Lenny Kravitz’s people had been looking for her.  Following a hastily arranged audition, YAHZARAH found herself immersed in a four-year whirlwind of touring, becoming a fixture in the band and even making an appearance in a documentary (Leaving It All Behind) with the renowned singer/songwriter.  “Sometimes people think that ‘delayed’ is ‘denied.’ Well, I believe that I was ‘delayed,” NOT ‘denied,’” she shares of her patience during the road back to music-making.  “It gave me time to really ‘make a record’ as opposed to rushing and trying to manufacture something. I could actually live and create simultaneously. So I needed the time to be out with Kravitz. The love I received from him and the fans brought me that confirmation that I’ve always been a rock is now.” I believe the world is ready for soulful black women to be acknowledged for making rock and pop music the playing field is open.

With The Ceremony already recorded and touring with Kravitz under her belt, YAHZARAH would soon find that old adage of “in due time” to not be merely cliché when she was approached by longtime friend, R&B star Raheem DeVaughn with an offer she couldn’t refuse.  Having nurtured their friendship over the years through mutual collaboration (i.e., her appearance on his recent Decade of a Love King set; his appearance on The Prelude’s “Come To Me”), Raheem had officially set up his DMG (DeVaughn Multimedia Group) company and offered to sign her.  “Raheem and I have been friends for number of years,” she shares.  “The reality is that we all came up together; I have always admired what Ra was doing. We’ve both seen the best and the worst that can happen. So he came to me like, ‘Hey, I’m finally in this place where I feel like I’ve learned so much that I can help my friends.’ I honored that because trust for me is difficult. But if I was going to trust anybody to work with and anybody to partner with, it would be him.”

With that, YAHZARAH fans and unsuspecting music lovers are in for a spectacularly produced, multi-influenced tour-de-force with The Ceremony.  Outside of her pristinely melodic vocals gliding amidst the spacious and genre-defying beat balladry of her aforementioned, first-recorded “Beautiful Ashes,” The Ceremony opens with her fiery vocals atop the all-the-way-live crunchy rock-funk of “Legend” and ensues on a stunning vocal and stylistically daring showcase of music fusions.  Whether displaying stratospheric vocal-works on the anthemic power-pop of “Beautiful User,” taking a more sensuous approach on the earthy ‘n moody “Too Good To Be True” and going sweet-to-vampy on her beat-driven, Prince-reminiscent “Drugs; produced by Jonas Rendbo while she was touring in Dinmark ” or flaunting more soulful licks to the more R&B-influenced “Back Seat of My Star” featuring her production by her group “MI7” and “F.M.T.U. (Fly Me to The Universe),” The Ceremony makes for a powerful artistic statement that proves thoroughly pleasing to the ear.  “’Fly Me to the Universe’ is actually produced by Beeboiseau, who is signed to DMG as well,” she shares of the latter track.  “He’s an amazing producer…really gifted. When I got the track, it was immediately really easy for me to write to it. I’m just excited to be able to just pull off my layers and have people get it.”  Other highlights include the hypnotically icy keys that propel the atmospheric lo-fi/pop of “Heights” and the easy-whinin’ dancehall/R&B-fused “Nsroma” (featuring Ghanian artist Manifest)  “That’s actually a song I made as a love letter to my home country of Ghana west Africa as well as my Son Miles Song,” she shares of the latter.  “And I just wanted to write something that encapsulated my love for the two cultures that have made me who I am Ghana as the place where the heart of me lives  and what that gift is giving to my son Miles. Nsroma in Twi means “Star” so I wrote about it as if we were our own planet a black planet that didn’t have to be imagined a magic that exists right here. No need to imaging a Wakanda when Africa is full of real life ones complete with their own heroics.  Manifest, who is an amazing Ghanaian artist, and I had been talking for a long time about doing something together. And it was awesome having he I and Ray in the studio together creating on the spot ”

Indeed, life’s ceremony proceeds on an upswing for YAHZARAH, with the imminent summer release of The Ceremony and other exciting opportunities on the horizon (i.e., her recent casting in the starring role of “Shekmet” in film-maker Kameko Tarnez’s upcoming movie trilogy, Protector of the Gods) in which she is also a producer along with Hill Harper and Ronda Ross daughter of Diana Ross and Berry Gordy , nevertheless in her truly grounded and humble demeanor she takes it all in stride in appreciation of the journey she’s already taken.  “I had to become my own fuel for moving forward, which is why it’s a ceremony. People have different ceremonies in life; mine was getting my ass up off the ground and putting on my crown and moving forward. Once you realize that you get past the part where you lost and you stop blaming yourself, , you find the new fuel to move forward to reach your goal. That’s the ceremony.”