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This September, The Outpost Performance Space will be giving hepcats a heavy dose of live music and everything jazz at one of the venue’s most beloved events, the 18th Annual New Mexico Jazz Festival. This year’s festival will feature one of the hippest vocalists in the modern jazz scene: Dallas-born, Grammy-nominated, multiple-award-winning, six-octave-ranged songstress Jazzmeia Horn.
Jazzmeia Horn — yes that is her real name — was raised in a Southern Baptist home in Texas and has been singing since she was 3.
“When my mom was having a bad day, you knew because of the type of music that she was playing. When my dad was pissed off and didn’t want to talk to you, you knew because of the type of music that he was playing,” Horn says. “Music set the tone in our home.”
In addition to being an accomplished singer and recording artist — her numerous accolades include winning the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Vocal-Jazz Competition in 2015 — Horn is the author of “Strive From Within: The Jazzmine Horn Approach.” Today she teaches music to about 7,000 students worldwide, but it wasn’t easy for Horn to get where she is today. She had to hustle. She says she worked her way through college before getting a record deal by busking. She says she would make more money if she sang songs by popular artists such as Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and Herbie Hancock, but her jazz aspirations remained steadfast.
“I worked at Applebee’s for the first three years of college,” Horn says. “I was relying on the tips from busking and the weekly gigs that I would have. The private gigs and the wedding gigs. If I wanted to save money for a record, I could do that because I was working my butt off and the gigs were paying more than Applebee’s tips. After winning the Monk competition, I got signed to Concord Records.”
Horn’s singing has been described as “vocalese-influenced,” but she humbly disagrees saying she believes authentic vocalese was born out of struggle, and isn’t just a cool stylistic choice. She says it’s kind of a lost art form.
“If you were a Black person in the ’40s or ’50s, you could not sing the solos or sing some of the same tunes that the white composers were playing,” Horn says. “They would play the same chord changes with a different melody.”
Horn says those new melodies were called “bebop heads” — some of the most complicated and demanding pieces of music to play or sing in any musical genre — and the precursor to the vocalese style. When artists began adding their own lyrics to bebop, vocalese was born.
Vocalese differs from “scatting,” a technique where singers improvise melodies using only their voice as an instrument, because vocalese usually contains recognizable lyrics.
Horn says she has a deep interest in the African diaspora and its tribes and languages, something formative to her identity not only as a musician, but to her personal identity. She says, “I would incorporate a lot of that by discovering myself in my style of dress.”
“When I had children, I was not as financially stable as I wanted to be in the first couple of years of their lives,” Horn says. “I thought, ‘Well, if I’m making clothes for the babies and the fabric is cheap, why don’t I try to make something for myself?’ And I did. For my Grammy outfits in 2017, 2019 and 2021, I ended up making all of my dresses for the red carpet.”
Outpost Productions, a nonprofit organization founded in 1988 by Tom Guralnick, has been in the New Mexico jazz game for a long time. For several years, the organization presented world music and experimental jazz at venues around town until opening their own venue in 1990 east of Nob Hill — an old print shop converted into a 100-seat theater with guest quarters and offices above.
In 2000, The Outpost moved to its current location on Yale Boulevard, just two blocks south of Central Avenue. The 160-seat, handicap accessible venue has a large collection of professional-quality instruments and equipment available for use by touring musicians including two vintage Steinway pianos. The Outpost also provides music education programs to the community and many of their instruments are available to students taking youth classes.
Guralnick, who is still executive director of the Outpost Performance Space today, is just as passionate about the music as he was decades ago. But these days he has a slightly different role, as one of the biggest jazz suppliers in town. The Outpost Performance Space will be New Mexico’s jazz headquarters in September, hosting several of the performances, but the festival will spread throughout multiple venues in Albuquerque and to the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe.
Jazzfest starts at The Outpost with New Mexico guitarist Michael Anthony and trumpeter Paul Gonzales who will be performing with their quartet Thursday, Sept. 5. New York-based, Azerbaijan-born composer and pianist Amina Figarova performs with her Sextet, Saturday, Sept. 7. Tuesday, Sept. 10, Vocalist José James, who played the Outpost in June 2023, is returning to celebrate his new release, 1978, which is inspired by 1970s contemporary music artists like Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson and Rick James.
Civic Plaza will also be one of the Jazzfest’s September performance destinations, and this year they will be blending some blues and soul into the jazz mix. Jazzfest has partnered with the City of Albuquerque to host Blues Night on Civic Plaza Saturday Sept. 21. Canadian-born guitarist and singer-songwriter Sue Folly with the Texas Horns will headline, but the event features some New Mexico swag from Santa Fe’s own Zenobia.
“I’m old enough to say I’ve lived a life where I can sing the blues. I played a lot of places and developed a large repertoire,” Zenobia says. “I’m honoring the people before me whose shoulders I stand on: BB King and Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and all those great composers, Etta James, Big Mama Thornton. These are people who came before me and inspired me to continue.”
Zenobia used to be a corporate executive, producing commercials in New York before moving to New Mexico in 2009. She says she worked with big people, had big budgets and big responsibilities.
“In New Mexico, I think in the first six months, I heard 10 car horns,” she says. “You will hear 100 horns in a millisecond in New York. So that chatter, that jabber, that noise was gone.”
Zenobia says living in New Mexico inspired her to write her second album in an interesting way.
“I started hearing music in my head. I was regurgitating song after song idea, I didn’t know where it was coming from. I couldn’t stop. I had to go away from my home and do a self retreat on 1,100 acres where there was nobody there but me and the caretaker. And at the end of 11 days, I had 11 songs,” she says. “I literally had to drive through an arroyo to get to the casita I was staying in, and the flow through nature, the clear sky, the whole ambience was so spiritual for me that I completed a CD called Resurrection.”
One track from Resurrection won a New Mexico Music Award for “best religious/gospel” in 2014. The CD won the award for “best of the year” in 2015.
The Outpost has partnered with the New Mexico Jazz Workshop this year to host Grammy-nominated percussionist John Santos and his sextet Friday, Sept. 6, at The Albuquerque Museum Amphitheater. Santos is a master of Afro-Latin music.
The jazz festival isn’t just about live musical performances. This year’s festival features some jazzy art and film to boot. The Outpost will have an art exhibit cleverly named Jazz Undercover. hosted by the curators of the Inpost Art Space, the venue’s art gallery.
“The curators are picking the jazz albums that they like, which is interesting because they aren’t experts on jazz,” Guralnick says. “So they’re not picking it because of jazz, but because of the artwork on the album covers. And we got several different collectors in town to pick 25 to 50 of their favorite album covers, so there’s a wide variety of stuff.”
The Outpost is also collaborating with Guild Cinema and will be screening two jazz films about Sun Ra. Space and Place and Joyful Noise will run Sept. 10 through 12 at the Guild.