Amorphous Jazzy Experiments For Your Slight Discomfort

Leila Adu is an artist with the ability to strike endlessly fascinating balances. She is a classically trained pianist, with a graduate degree in composition, who plays a lot of rock clubs and festivals. Her music combines the dissonance of avant garde composers and free jazz artists like Sonny Sharrock with the playful experimentation and fierce social commentary of punk provocateurs like Nina Hagen and Eve Libertine.

No doubt, it’s because of these complexities that her music appeals to such a wide range of people and allows her to cross musical boundaries with unusual ease. She has composed for both symphony orchestra and gamelan, and Nirvana producer Steve Albini recorded her album Dark Joan. He calls her “Spooky Adu.”

As a performer, this New Zealander of Ghanaian descent has the glowing magnetism of a vocal jazz diva from another era. Her smoky and resonant voice can captivate ears unaccustomed to the kind of music she makes — which is most everyone.

It’s genuinely difficult to categorize her. “Alt-pop artist” doesn’t quite fit, but “experimental composer” is even worse. She is a singer-songwriter, but more than that, she is part of a generation of highly accomplished young musicians such as Micachu, Joanna Newsom, and Esperanza Spalding who are eroding the distinctions between popular music and the increasingly academic worlds of jazz and instrumental music.

Her recently released fourth album Ode to the Unknown Factory Worker is as slippery and mesmerizing as anything she’s ever done. Watch the video for “Fortuna,” the second single off Ode, and enter Adu’s borderless world:

Photo Credit: Leon Dale