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SONIC REDUCER "I get to go to the ball!"
Longtime Oakland soul hopeful Ledisi isn’t spilling the beans about what designer she’ll be wearing to the Grammy Awards on Feb. 10, but on the phone from New York City, where she’s as deep into the wardrobe as the lion and the witch, she guarantees, "I’ll be cute!"
Red-carpet frocks, on-and-off awards ceremonies, and nominations for Best R&B Album for last year’s Lost and Found (Verve Forecast) and, get this, Best New Artist ("People say I’m a new artist, and I am a new artist in this mainstream world," says the woman who put out her previous two CDs on her LeSun label. "I’ve never had third-party involvement in anything!") — it’s all high drama for Ledisi Anibade Young. Nonetheless, she knows she’ll be enjoying herself to the core and even more because she’ll be exactly where she wants to be: namely, comfortable in her own skin.
"I just feel like I’ve finally come into my own, meaning I’m OK with myself," the vocalist says, bubbling like de Brignac. "I’m still hungry, but I’m not begging anymore."
As we speak, Ledisi is floating, as she puts it, in more ways than one: she’s drifting between residences in NYC, Oakland, and Washington DC and lifting higher about the national spotlight that comes with her nominations, a recognition laid on a clutch of other once and present Bay Area artists like Keyshia Cole, Machine Head, and Turtle Island Quartet and local indie label Six Degrees (for Bebel Gilberto, Ce’U, and Spanish Harlem Orchestra). Regardless of how you feel about the continuing relevance of the Recording Academy paperweights — yes, the Best Polka Album category is still in place — the thrill a nominee like Ledisi feels is catching, especially when one considers the flights of ups and downs she’s undergone over the years.
"I didn’t think I wanted the pressure of being in the front again, with all the issues of image and the style of singing and choosing a category to be in — you know, all that kind of the pressure!" she says, recalling the times she thought about giving up performing. After her debut, Soulsinger (LeSun, 1999), won near-universal praise but garnered zero coveted R&B radio attention, she left Oakland and moved to NYC because, she says, she was "tired of going around in circles." With an understudy role in Broadway’s Caroline, or Change in her change pocket, Ledisi had begun developing the stage version of The Color Purple when she signed to Verve and dropped out of the production to work on Lost and Found.
But after working for a year and a half to get her deal, "the guy who signed me," Verve president Ryan Goldstein, was suddenly laid off among many others. She finished the record, took a breath, and went back into the studio, fearing the new powers that be would require further alterations.
Meanwhile, she adds, "I was finding myself in my personal life": she ended a long relationship and met her father. Her R&B vocalist mother had already told her that her biological father was Larry Saunders, but only when Ledisi traveled to Amsterdam and mentioned his name to a DJ there did she realize others knew The Prophet of Soul, the name of Saunders’s 1976 Soul International LP. "He said, ‘We know who he is!’ and pulled out his record," Ledisi remembers. Her parents had met on tour when Saunders was a starring performer and her mother a backup singer, and when Ledisi finally met her father, "it was just like peas in a pod. I never felt so complete. Now I don’t have those things around me going, ‘Who am I?’<0x2009>"
Ledisi also discovered that her father was the love child of blues vocalist Johnny Ace, who achieved legend as an early rock ‘n’ roll casualty, allegedly shooting himself during a Russian roulette game on Christmas Day, 1954. "When I found out," she says, "I was, like, ‘No wonder we’re all singers!’<0x2009>"
"You know this record is really powerful, with all this happening during its process," she says of Lost and Found, which eventually debuted at number 10 on Billboard‘s R&B chart. "I tell you, with all the stuff that went on, it’s all worth it. Win or lose, I’m just so complete. I just want to stay in the moment — couldn’t ask for a better moment to happen."
WALKING PNEUMONIA, HERE WE COME
THE EVERYBODYFIELDS
Everything’s OK with these tenderhearted crust-country kids. With I See Hawks in LA. Wed/6, 8 p.m., $12. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com
PIERCED ARROWS
Dead Moon rising: "Walking Wounded" vets Fred and Toody Cole keep flying that lo-fi flag. With Black Lips. Fri/8, 9 p.m., $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com
TERRIBLE TWOS
Motor City kiddies trade in snot-laced cacophony. With Top Ten and Wylde Youth. Sat/9, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
PALEO
Gimmick or gimme-gimme? Brooklyn’s David Strackany followed in the footsteps of Suzan-Lori Parks with his "Song Diary" project: 365 songs, one written and recorded each day for a year. But his next trick after that media blitz? With the Blank Tapes and Eddy Burke. Sun/10, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
MERLE HAGGARD
NorCal’s country music giant reaches east with 2007’s The Bluegrass Sessions (McCoury/Hag) — see where it takes him. Mon/11, 8 p.m., $65. Grand at the Regency Center, 1290 Sutter, SF. www.ticketmaster.com
LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES
The very newest sounds from the Venezuelans of disco derring-do? With Si*Se and DJ Franky Boissy. Mon/11–Tues/12, 8 p.m., $22. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com