How Long Has This Been Going On?

It's hard to believe that anyone can really be called Jazzmeia Horn, but that's what the name tag reads on the most exciting new jazz singer we've heard in a long, long time.  Fred Kaplan, a New Yorker writer, had an article recently praising another singer (with another striking name: Cecile McLorin Salvant), and there was a lot of justified enthusiasm for Amy Winehouse's bluesy style, but while it is a pleasure to hear their work, it is Jazzmeia Horn who sets the place on fire.

She's a 26-year-old Texan, and she's been singing for a while--she won the 2015 Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Competition--but her name (and who could forget her name, or her voice, once heard?) seem only recently to have reached these distant shores. Catch her performance on YouTube. Go for "East of the Sun," at Dizzy's Club CocaCola.

It has seemed for a long time that nothing especially surprising was happening in jazz. And to quote Whitney Balliett, the essence of jazz is "the sound of surprise." That's what we get with Jazzmeia Horn.