The jazz vocalist, composer and Grammy nominee discusses her upcoming residency with the Harvard Jazz Band. They will perform together April 1 in Sanders Theatre.
By Rebecca Cadenhead '23
OFA Staff Blogger
The first thing about Carmen Lundy is her voice. It has a quality which conveys, without explicitly announcing, that the speaker is used to being listened to; it scrapes the bottom of the vocal register and comes out smooth and crisp.
Lundy, a jazz vocalist, composer, and two-time Grammy nominee, places a premium on her voice. Much sets Lundy apart from many other jazz musicians — she performs mainly her own compositions, rather than covers, and is meticulous about their arrangement, for instance. But what really distinguishes her, in her own words, is her sound. “You can listen to my first record and go, ‘Oh, I know that voice,’” she says. “The quality in that sound is a unique identifying factor, an aspect of what makes me Carmen Lundy.”
This spring, Lundy will bring her talents to Harvard as this year’s Jazz Master in Residence at the Office of the Arts Jazz Program. Lundy, who is only the second fully in-residence jazz artist since the Covid-19 pandemic began, will work with undergraduates in the Harvard Jazz Band to put together a concert of her own songs, particularly from her latest, Grammy-nominated album, Fade to Black. Their work together will culminate with a public concert, led by Yosvany Terry, 8 p.m. Saturday, April 1 at Sanders Theatre.
The Office for the Arts will host a pizza lunch for Lundy and undergraduate students, 12-1 p.m. Wednesday, March 29. All students are welcome and can sign up here. Event is limited to 20.
This is something of a familiar role for Lundy. From 1997 to 2015, she was the vocal director of the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., a residency which selects and nurtures young jazz musicians. “I've had a lot of experience with developing the younger composer,” she says. Teaching, for Lundy, is more than just imparting knowledge on others; “I take away things about what they have to offer as much as I come in to assist them” she says. “The collaboration can be very fulfilling, learning from another person's way of arriving at the same objective.”
Indeed, this particular collaboration at Harvard might lead Lundy in a different direction than she’s gone recently. Though she’ll be playing her own songs, they won’t be arranged by her, and she’ll be playing on March with a jazz orchestra of brass instruments, a shift from her usual style. In Fade to Black, Lundy’s voice takes center stage, accompanied by what seems to be a relatively small ensemble: a few horns, a piano, a drum, a bass guitar.
This adaptability is part of the beauty of the form. Jazz, Lundy says, is “kind of living in the now.” Improvisation is integral to jazz. The shape of a song can change with the instruments playing it, or with the whims of the musician as they’re performing. When you’re playing jazz, “there's never a moment where you're not in some creative process,” Lundy says. “There’s constant change in the melody and the way we play the rhythm, the way we construct the forms of things.” To Lundy it is, ultimately, a way of making your own work “within the context of that which has already been created.”
“I find jazz very liberating,” Lundy says. That sense of liberation, it seems, is what Lundy most wants to impart to students in her time at Harvard; “Hopefully what [students] take away from me moves them into their next phase of whatever that is that they’re going to accomplish. I hope that I've given them some encouragement or something to grasp onto to move them forward.”
Carmen Lundy will be the featured artist with the Harvard Jazz Band, led by Yosvany Terry, in the concert Daughter of the Universe: The Music of Carmen Lundy, 8 p.m. April 1 at Sanders Theatre. The event is open to the public. Tickets may be purchased here.