Sara Serpa is included in the list of nominees for the 2021 Jazz Journalists Awards, in the Female Vocalist of the Year category.
Nominees in most categories were chosen by the votes of the Professional Journalist Members of the Jazz Journalists Association. Nominations were made on the basis of work done in calendar year 2020, with the exception of Lifetime Achievement Awards categories, in which nominations are for a lifetime body of work. For more info on the nominees click here.
Sara Serpa was voted #1 Vocals of the Year 2020 by the NPR (National Public Radio) Jazz Critics Poll.
“Below are the results of NPR Music’s 8th Annual Jazz Critics Poll (my 15th, going back to the poll’s beginnings in the Village Voice). These are the jazz albums that lit up a dark, unsettling year. Maria Schneider’s Data Lords was the critics choice — no surprise, though relative unknown Sara Serpa’s victory in the Vocal category in a year when both Kurt Elling and Gregory Porter released new albums was.” Click here to read more.
“M³ is a revolutionary new model for mentorship which was created by co-founders Jen Shyu and Sara Serpa in March and launched in June 2020 at the height of the pandemic. The founders describe M³ as “a think tank for new ways to connect, collaborate, support, create, and empower womxn musicians worldwide including BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+, and musicians of all abilities across generations.”
To celebrate these first two concerts of this new initiative, we asked the twelve initial participating musicians about why they decided to participate in this opportunity and how mutual mentorship and creative collaboration have affected their artistic process. New Music USA is funding the next round of M³ collaborations. “
What an honor and surprise to be voted the National Musician of the Year 2020 by Portuguese magazine Jazz.pt. I am grateful to all who listened to Recognition and selected it from the amount of amazing music produced and released this year.
From Luanda to New York: the amazing Angolan singer Aline Frazão is lending her voice to Recognition. I hope you watch this iteration of the film: Aline narrating Amílcar Cabral’s texts is so powerful and deep.
Recognition portrays scenes of Black female workers out in salt fields, doing extremely hard work repetitively, sometimes with children on their back or barefoot. Black Angolan women suffered much violence during Portuguese occupation while simultaneously being erased from the country’s official liberation history. For that reason, and to make this project complete, it became particularly important for me to have the voice of a Black Angolan woman narrating the injustices and violence perpetrated during colonial times.
Although the film was released back in June, I felt that Recognition wasn’t completely finished. It is hard to let go and accept that each album/ project has a timeline and belongs to a specific moment. But I feel that with Aline’s voice, Recognition is now concluded.
Thank you, Emmanuel Iduma for your kindness and insight and to Bruno Soares for continuously helping me improve the film. To Zeena Parkins, Mark Turner and David Virelles for giving life to my music. And to Aline who graciously accepted my invitation, deepening the dialogue and opening a new door to a reality I’ve been researching for such a long time.
JEN SHYU AND SARA SERPA LAUNCH M³—MUTUAL MENTORSHIP FOR MUSICIANS— A NEW INITIATIVE DEDICATED TO FOSTERING CREATIVE PARTNERSHIPS AMONG WOMXN MUSICIANS AROUND THE WORLD
Initiative comprises four sessions a year in which 10–12 musicians regularly convene to share their experiences, while also each pairing with a fellow participant to develop a newly commissioned duo work to be premiered in season-finale virtual showcase.
Co-founded in spring 2020 by vocalist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu and vocalist-composer Sara Serpa, M³—Mutual Mentorship for Musicians—was conceived as an initiative that empowers and elevates womxn musicians around the world (including BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ across generations) in a new model of mentorship comprising four sessions per year with each session culminating in a performance of new collaborative commissions. With the aim of building new paradigms of mentorship, M³ encourages the reciprocal, intergenerational exchange of knowledge and experience; formation of new collaborations with musicians outside of one’s inner circle; and cultivation of new ideas and formats for solo and collaborative performance, whether live or virtual.
It took moving to the US for singer Sara Serpa to fully grapple with the colonialist legacy of her native Portugal — a topic rarely discussed back at home — even though her family was directly involved in its waning days. Her parents were born in Angola, where they saw the mistreatment of the native population, an injustice they protested after moving to Lisbon.
Her stunning multi-media project Recognition confronts that dark heritage. Working with director Bruno Soares, she created a silent video from her grandfather’s home movies of Angola and Lisbon, interleaved with quotations from African anti-colonialist Amílcar Cabral, and the dazzling chamber jazz heard on this recording serves as its soundtrack.
On most of the pieces she lets the images do the heavy lifting, complementing them with wordless vocals marked by a characteristic precision and purity free of vibrato and empty ornamentation. Her superb collaborators —saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist David Virelles, and harpist Zeena Parkins — interact in shifting combinations, through composed and improvised material.
While the timbre often feels weightless, there’s a ruminative atmosphere to these gauzy vignettes, as charged unison lines and prickly counterpoint float more often than they resolve. Three pieces feature settings of riveting texts by Cabral, scholar Linda Heywood and fiction writer José Luandino that highlight the atrocities and resistance.
