All-female jazz band makes a visit to campus

This weekend the CSB/SJU Fine Arts Series hosted an event titled Bessie, Billie & Nina–Pioneering Women in Jazz, showcasing an all-female jazz band featuring singers Charenée Wade, Vanisha Gould and Tahira Clayton.

The band and singers are all based out of New York City. Clayton and Wade are both educators. Clayton teaches at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, Bloomingdale School of Music and Trinity Wall Street. Wade is a professor at the Aaron Copland School at Queens College and was recently appointed to Peabody Institute.

The concert highlighted the music of three famous female jazz vocalists throughout history.

The concert was the first Fine Arts Series event where the audience didn’t have to wear masks or show their COVID vaccine card to attend.

The concert started with Gould covering songs by Bessie Smith, one of the most popular female jazz singers of the ’20s and ’30s.

Gould brought young energy and new life to Smith’s music, whose recordings from the ‘20s don’t fully do the music justice.

Clayton then came to the stage to sing the music of Billie Holiday. Compared to the rough voice of Holiday, Clayton sang in a refreshing, yet powerful, tone that brought the audience to its feet by the time she was done. Clayton sang the song “Strange Fruit,” a powerful song about lynching in the South.

The song was initially recorded in 1939 during a time when the lynching of African Americans in the South was at a peak.

While singing “Strange Fruit,” Clayton did not hold back and put a lot of emotion and power into her performance of this important song. Last to the stage was Wade who sang the music of Nina Simone. The concert moved into the lively era of the ‘60s.

Wade sang “Mississippi God Damn,” a song about the murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., which killed four Black children.

After singing it, Wade reminded the audience that this song still speaks some truth today.

The concert ended with all three singers coming together to sing the well-known song “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone.

The song made for quite a finale with the audience standing up and clapping for half of it.