“One of the top 50 jazz vocalists of all time.”
- Jazz Magazine
I am Jeri Brown: artistic voice, citizen of the world of imagination,
black woman, griotte,
performer, academic,
poet and writer.
Greetings WORDSMITH Members!
It's time to start my Jeri Brown Author Newsletter after a few years of keeping it on my "To Do" list. My writing website is authorjeribrown.com. Check the web link below to join announced Zoom Meetings and monthly news bytes for WORDSMITH members and invitees.This Zoom platform allows WORDSMITH writers to talk with each other at group meetings and share member writing news. This site is of particular interest to those seeking writing prompts and support from fellow writers and for announcements of member writing.
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86553865949?pwd=RmxQVEY4T0tUZEpnM01QU0NvUDMxUT09
Read below a published interview by Chicago journalist and author Sharon Michalove in Paris, France December 13, 2024. This interview took place at the Café de la Mairie on the Rue de Bretagne in the Marais. Enjoy!!
Jeri Brown Does a 180
While she may not leap buildings at a single bound, Jeri Brown’s multifaceted life as jazz artist, professor, writer, and mom, comes close. If there is such a thing as an Every woman, Jeri fits the profile while breaking the mold.
Josephine Baker was from St. Louis, and so am I.
In the early 1990s, Jeri was a busy professor at three universities in Ohio—Cleveland State, University of Akron, and Kent State. In addition, she was an in-demand jazz performer, recording artist, and the mother of two children. But everything changed when she was offered a full-time faculty position at Concordia University in Montreal.
This unanticipated change in direction dramatically altered her life. The move brought a host of challenges as she plotted the move. The Blackpool boundary marks the corridor between Montreal and New York City. The border crossing took on a symbolic significance as she moved back and forth between her new home and her family in Cleveland.
The move brought a host of challenges, not least helping her children adjust not only to a new country with no family close by, coping with a new language, and negotiating a very different cultural environment. The university helped her settle into a comfortable brownstone, with a landlady who spoke no English. And yet, they managed to communicate and become friends.
Unlike the rest of Canada, Quebec’s population is more than 80% French Canadian and francophonie predominates. Her son and daughter were immediately plunged into total immersion classes, as was Jeri herself.
Her daughter, who now teaches advanced-placement French in the U.S., had the dream teacher, encouraging her love for the language through reading. Her son, however, had nightmare language instructors, who sowed antipathy rather than acceptance, creating frustration and resistance. In the end, while remaining in Canada, he studied advanced business techniques, moving to Toronto and a much more anglophone community where he has minimal exposure to French.
With temporary visa after temporary visa, Jeri had to decide whether the move to Canada was permanent. Once she made that decision, the fun of dealing with bureaucracy for permanent visa through citizenship was a maze of complicated steps. After over thirty years as a Canadian resident, she is certain the effort was worth making.
On top of these challenges, Jeri still had contractual performances all over the world, and while this made her a great ambassador for her new country, the stresses of travel and arranging childcare on top of her professorial commitments were grueling. Flying out for a gig, performing for one night, flying home, and teaching the next day took its toll.
In a conversation with Abbey Lincoln, they commiserated on the difficulties of being everything to everyone along with grueling realities of travel. Although she had the chance to work with outstanding performers like jazz great Wynton Marsalis, she eventually fired her agents, took fewer performing opportunities, and devoted more time to teaching and family.
A performer from the age of three, Jeri stretches the traditional boundaries of jazz, hovering on the edge in her improvisations. Improvisional jazz usually is more daring by instrumentalists than by singers. Jeri’s interpretations of the doubie doubie do, have brought her both accolades and criticism.
A proponent of freeing the voice, she has also thrown off the shackles from constraints and expectations. She knows what she wants to accomplish, and a bit on the wild side, she charts her own path.
The watchwords of Jeri’s life and career are adaptation, navigation, and optimism. In Montreal she has been fortunate to find a welcoming, accepting community that allowed her to pursue future opportunities and pathways.
As a teacher, Jeri specializes in working with singers with disabilities, helping them using roadblocks as launching pads and the disabilities as assets, a process she calls creating vocal ecosystems. Students are encouraged to start where they are and then build techniques to move them forward in developing new skills, using physical movement as one component.
Over her career, Jeri has turned student skepticism and resistance toward her techniques into acceptance and achievement—with the result being many amazing success stories. But her own story of acceptance, perseverance, and daring may be the greatest success story of them all.
Symbolized by moving through the gateway of Blackpool and creating a new life on the other side, she is a model of inspiration for anyone facing unexpected challenges and uncertainty in their own life.
Jeri Brown is the author of A Necessary Family: Cosmo Gumbo, fantasy injustice in a make-believe world ( young adult, e-book: Jongleur Publishing, Tellwell Publishing), Skin Folk, a myriad of written stems and shapes about kin (adult, family, e-book: Jongleur Publishing) and They Won’t Believe You: Dolena’s Journey (adult, true crime e-book: Jongleur Publishing), and has 16 award-winning albums to her credit. © 2024 Jeri Brown
Sharon Michalove writes romantic suspense and traditional mystery as well as being a published historian. She lives in Chicago with her cat, Caro.
Discussions about this post-
What a fascinating story with so many parallels to my own. I grew up in Cleveland. When I was working in Chicago, my wife got offered a teaching position at McGill University, which is right next to Concordia. We too had to go through the Kafkaesque process of becoming landed immigrants and then Canadian citizens. We lived there for 15 years and raised our own kids in Montreal. All of us had to struggle through learning French. Eventually I did business in French. Now we are all in San Diego but grew so much from our time in Montreal.
Very interesting interview of a brilliant and resilient woman!
JERI BROWN BACKGROUND
Committed to the legacy of vocal jazz, Jeri carved her own musical path in spectacular international recordings for Justin Time Records and Jongleur Records, over a 30-year illustrious performance and recording career, consistently conveying her artistic signature, filling the historical spectrum of classic American songbook themes, and original and classic jazz compositions. Poet, fantasy writer, vocal artist and educator, Jeri Brown is an African American griotte (vocal artist, educator, vocalist, researcher, writer of praise and love songs of creative fiction and nonfiction, producer, composer activist of minority matters expressed in rights & ritual songs). Described as three-dimensional, to the up and down (a four-octave range), Brown's voice has an in and out, a plasticity of dynamics stretched and deepened by changes of vowel and tonal color, from breathy contralto to high flute- like tones. Like Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan Brown's approach to a song is as an instrument. Brown's perfectly pitched rich complex voice, afforded Jeri Brown a lifetime of vocal experiences in jazz, pop and spiritual to avant-garde, classical and musical theatre earning her a reputation as one of jazz' most outstanding “artistic" vocalists including the distinction from the French publication Jazz Magazine as one of top 50 jazz vocalists of all time.
"I love the challenge of a musical moment, the immediacy of it." As part of the civil rights era of the 60s and 70s in St. Louis I was bused to an all-white school and witnessed a lot of racist events. We had separate lunches, gym times, and white folks in the community where we went to school said nasty things. They threw nasty things. An emerging athletic artist, I often wanted to stay after classes for coaching and practice with classmates. but I so afraid in the community of the school. I thought I might be harmed in some way. It was not so rosy to be privileged to learn more while being in fear of one's life. This stuff runs deep in my childhood memories and continued throughout my performance and educational career. As no stranger to the marches, sit-ins and arrests in my past, I have continued to advocate for peace. With stage, recordings and films as my platforms, I was never a diva adorned in a beautiful dress, kept like an urn on a mantel. I was a warrior, my own kind of soldier with a mission for equality. I believe artists have the ability to affect humanity and spirituality always. And if not now, when?"
Jeri Produces, Directs and Performs in THE SPIRIT COMES THROUGH.