Back in 2018, singer Tessa Souter released Picture in Black and White, an album of original pieces reflecting on the 1984 revelation that her estranged birth father was from Trinidad. Knowing that she had roots in Africa and the Caribbean, not Britain and Spain as her mother had told her to halt school bullying, was life-altering for her. [Photo above of Tessa Souter]
Now, Tessa has released a new album—Shadows and Silence: The Erik Satie Project (Noanara). She wrote the lyrics for six Satie pieces and added four non-Satie works that have the composer's flavor. For those unfamiliar, Satie was a French pianist and composer whose career straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Best known for his originality, spareness and ironic wit, Satie greatly influenced French impressionist composers and artists.
Her new album (here) has a simmering intensity and lyrical quality that fully grasps Satie's restlessness and avant-garde minimalism. The music also reflects the growing anxiety during the years leading up to World War I, with Tessa's lyrics in step with the brooding mood. With her on the album are Luis Perdomo (piano), Yasushi Nakamura (bass), Billy Drummond (drums), Nadje Noorhuis (trumpet and flugelhorn), Steve Wilson (soprano saxophone) and Pascal Borderies (spoken word).
If you're in New York tonight (July 1), Tessa (above) will be appearing at Joe's Pub, inside the Public Theater. She'll be accompanied by pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Boris Kozlov and drummer Billy Drummond, plus Steve Wilson on saxophone. Her 75-minute performance starts at 7 p.m. For information, go here.
Here's my email interview with Tessa:
JazzWax: What did your parents do for a living?
Tessa Souter: My dad, David, was a student at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art and became an art historian. My mum, who had many names until she settled on Elizabeth when I was 14, was an artist’s model. Over her life, she has done many things.
JW: Such as?
TS: She was a nurse and at different points owned a hotel, a fish-and-chip shop, a vintage clothing store, a café—even though she couldn’t cook—and had a little art gallery. She wore hand-painted skirts, cut her hair short and was talented at many things. She could draw, write poetry, sing—she taught me to sing when I was 3 and we sang together all the time. She also did ballroom dancing and was an active member of a light opera group well into her 80s.
JW: And your dad?
TS: He was the fun parent. He was athletic and aesthetic. He chased us in the park and played cricket with us, and he’d take me to the art galleries and ask my opinion of the work. I remember spending half an hour discussing Van Gogh’s Sunflowers when I was 4 or 5. He could recite poetry and Shakespeare’s sonnets, and he knew T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets by heart. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was kind of a family poem, which we all learned. I can still recite the first part. Briefly, he drove a green 1925 two-seater with a trunk that opened into a “dickey seat.”
JW: As bohemians, it sounds like your parents did a lot of reading, yes?
TS: They did. I was named after the Hardy novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I still have the flaking leather-bound copy. I wrote a poem on the title page when I was 11: “I, Tess, was named after this book / In ’56, when I was born, this maid’s name I took / Remember, in years to come and I be dead / “E’er word you read, I too have read.” I loved reading and singing as a child. Neither one of my parents was cut out to be parental. As my mum once said, “I may not have given you the best childhood, Tess, but at least I gave you something to write about.” She was funny, too.
JW: Where did you grow up?
TS: We moved around a lot. We weren’t well-off, but when I was 7, my mum had incredible house karma and somehow found us a three-story apartment in the Knightsbridge section of London. We shared it with a couple of lodgers to help pay the rent. We were a five-minute walk from Harrods department store and less than that in the other direction to the Joe Lyons Café, where my brother, Simon, and I would get lunch for roughly a quarter each. Egg, chips and beans followed by sponge pudding and custard. When I need comfort food, that’s still my go-to. Many years later Joe Lyons was turned into a Pizza Express, where I performed for the first time, in 2003. Sadly, it’s closed now.
JW: How many siblings?
TS: Nine from my birth father’s side, but my closest siblings are my mum’s children: my brother, Mark, who’s 15 years younger, and Simon, who was born four days short of a year later than me, so for four days of the year, we’re “twins.”
JW: You two must have been close, yes?
TS: He was my best friend growing up. When my parents worked during school holidays, my brother and I looked after each other. Our parents would send us off, admonishing us to “stay together!” When we were 6 and 7, we’d spend all day in Hyde Park. If it rained, we spent it at Harrods. The store was fantastic for kids. There was a pet department, which was like a mini zoo, and every now and then there would be a fascinating exhibition on the third floor. And, of course, the toy department.
JW: Did store employees wonder why you were running around unsupervised?
TS: No one ever asked where our parents were. I guess that was pretty normal for kids in those days. We often ran into other lone kids. When my brother and I were separated at 11 and 12 after he went to live with our dad after my parents divorced, we wrote each other long letters. We lived together for a year as adults, and wrote songs and stories together. I was always fascinated with words.
JW: When did you start piano lessons?
TS: My brother and I went to boarding school for two years, starting when we were 7 and 8. It was an arts-oriented school. We did things like Eurhythmy—a movement art developed by Rudolf Steiner that expresses spoken language and music through specific gestures and movements. I was 8 when I started on the piano with Miss Jacobs, who terrified me. The weird thing is, I don't recall us having a piano to practice on at the boarding house. Maybe that's why she was kind of mean.
JW: Did big-beat pop music in London then have an impact on you?
TS: The first record I asked Mum to buy for me was Helen Shapiro’s Walking Back to Happiness—which makes sense now that I know that Shapiro was a teenager. At 10, I asked my mum for Jacques Loussier’s Air on a G String, which was on the Top of the Pops TV show.
JW: And the Beatles?
TS: My dad gave me the Beatles’ White Album for Christmas when I was 12. I loved that. At 15, I was totally into Soft Machine III and obsessed with Sandy Denny, Fairport Convention, Jacquie McPhee and Pentangle, which I discovered at 13 on a BBC TV show called Take Three Girls.
JW: When did you start listening to jazz?
TS: After we moved to Wales when I was 16. We lived with an eccentric violinist-percussionist. He was a fabulous mimic, and when our electricity would get cut off, he’d call the power department and pretend to be our superposh landlady, Mrs. Dunlop, ordering them to put the power back on. He had Cannonball Adderley’s album Something Else. I totally wore that record out. I met Hank Jones twice and told him he was on the first jazz record I owned, at 16. Both times he said, “Last year?”
JW: What came next?
TS: My other obsessions were Santana, Osibisa, Captain Beefheart’s Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot. My “doorway” album to jazz was Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer, which I discovered somehow in the 1980s. For 15 years, I couldn’t go a day without listening to it. I also was obsessed with Milton Nascimento. I discovered Sarah Vaughan only because he was on her album Brazilian Romance. That led me to Billie and Ella and the rest. I sang along to them all.
JW: When did you teach yourself guitar?
TS: After my parents divorced, my mother and I moved to Devon. My new piano teacher there was Mrs. Muirhead. She was lovely, but I was super self-critical and if I heard classical music on the radio, it demoralized me because I wasn’t at that level. So, I never practiced, which meant that every lesson would be sight-reading. One day, studying for one of the grade exams, Mrs. Muirhead heard my singing voice and insisted I take up singing. My mum had a guitar in the house, which she never played, so I took it. My best friend was learning guitar, and she showed me some chords. I taught myself the rest. Somehow, I learned Bert Jansch’s Angie by ear. That guitar went with me everywhere. I’d play and sing during lunch break surrounded by a gaggle of girls. I wish I still played, but I don’t.
JW: When did you learn about your father?
TS: When I was 12, my mum told me that my beloved dad was not my birth father. That explained the mystery of why I had a “permanent tan” while my brother was blond. Mum told me that my birth father had died in a plane crash before I was born and that he was Spanish and the son of a flamenco dancer. I asked her questions about him, but she wasn’t very forthcoming, except to say that he was an amazing singer. It wasn’t until I was 28 that I found out he was black. And alive!
JW: Did you reach out?
TS: I came across his name in the London telephone directory and called and it was him. About the only thing she’d told me about him that was true was that he was a great singer. When I told him Mum had said his mother was a flamenco dancer, he burst out laughing. Anyway, finding out that my dad wasn’t my dad sent me off the rails a bit in school. I went from teacher’s pet to rebel and class clown. A couple of years ago, I wrote my dad a long letter, telling him how important he was and is to me. I feel blessed to have lived long enough to understand and truly love my parents.
JW: What caused you to leave home at 16?
TS: At 14, I was sent to a mixed boarding school. A boy sneaked into the dorm and I was blamed for letting him in, which I actually didn’t. I was expelled. I had to go and live with my dad because Mum disappeared for six months. That was hard because we kept thinking she might turn up, so I didn’t go to school or have a social life. Then Mum reappeared and wanted me back, so I went to live with her and her new husband and my baby brother in Wiltshire. I was very maternal and loved doing things like changing his diaper and taking him out with me, carrying him on my hip. But I was definitely a third wheel at home.
JW: What happened?
TS: At 15, I got waylaid by an older man who lived in the village and had lied about his age to my parents. He took advantage of my unhappy home life and deliberately got me pregnant. We ran away a month before my 16th birthday, when I was four months pregnant. We went first to London, where we lived with his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend, who was a burglar.
JW: A burglar?
TS: He would go out in the mornings, like it was a day job. I was very disapproving. We all went on holiday together to Wales in a stolen bright-red VW Bug, a rental that was never returned. While driving through a coastal village in Cardiganshire, we saw an ad for apartments to rent and stayed. The burglar and his very posh girlfriend moved on after a month or so. That’s where my son was born. The whole village was so excited that I gave him a Welsh name, Byron, and everyone pressed a silver coin into his palm for luck. When he was six weeks old, his father and I married. I look at my youngest granddaughter now, who is about to turn 17, and I can’t believe I already had a one-year-old by then. My son was my absolute universe. I escaped from my husband when I was 18 and became a single parent. We saw him maybe three times after that, and he stopped sending money after six months.
JW: Given all that pressure, it’s amazing you made it to London University.
TS: By the time I was 15, I had been to 16 schools, because my mum was constantly on the move. But my parents had always instilled in me the importance of education, and I’d had a lot of positive feedback as a child from teachers. Thank goodness for the British education system. Once you got into university, the government gave everyone a grant back then. I went on the dole during the holidays. I was broke, but it was doable. My plan was to become an English professor at the local university.
JW: That plan was interrupted?
TS: I was stalked by a schizophrenic woman who had it in her head that my son was actually hers. She hounded me off and on for three years. It was very stressful. I was afraid to go out. Or I’d stay locked in the bathroom because I thought I heard a funny noise in the hall. She broke into the house in the end, which got her sent to the local mental hospital for a year. While she was away, I left the area and ended up at London University’s Queen Mary College.
JW: After college, you were a freelance writer?
TS: First I got a job in London editing reports and proposals for a Lebanese construction company for two years. It was stressful because we were submitting projects to the United Nations Development Programme and World Bank with crazy tight deadlines. So, I started buying The Guardian newspaper every Monday, when they advertised creative and media jobs.
JW: What did you come up with?
TS: I finally found a job as an editorial assistant at Parents magazine in London. I was 31 and my son was 15, so it worked. I helped on the fashion and news desks, and I wrote articles. I loved it, but after a year I wanted to branch out. I became a freelance copy editor for British Elle, Cosmopolitan and other magazines. Then I got offered a long-term freelance gig for the British launch of Elle Decoration. I still sang all the time at home and dreamed about becoming a professional singer, but I didn’t think it would ever happen. Plus, I loved writing. I never dreamed of giving it up.
JW: Why did you decide to move to the U.S. in 1992?
TS: My second husband and I broke up when my son was 19. I’d had to move out of the house, and 92-year-old photojournalist Stefan Lorant, whom I had previously interviewed for Britain’s Sunday Correspondent magazine, invited me to visit him in Lenox, Mass. I had two other friends in the States, one in New York and the other in San Francisco. So I packed a small carry-on, planning to spend a month. I spent a week with Stefan and a week in New York before moving on to San Francisco.
JW: Didn't want to go home?
TS: I wasn’t planning on staying, but I had nowhere to live in England and no money. I found a cheap sublet, sharing with two guys in San Francisco, and cleaned houses for 2 1/2 years. Since I'm a neat freak I thought it might even be fun. It wasn’t, but the work kept me afloat. And my clients were mostly sweet, including a German couple who had an amazing stereo and great taste in music. It’s where I first heard Nnenna Freelon (Heritage) and Betty Carter (Feed the Fire). They’d be out so I could clean and sing along at the top of my lungs. I had another client who would give me Tower Records gift certificates for Christmas, knowing I would spend any cash tip on my bills. Some dear friends loaned me a computer and let me fax the U.K. for free from their office and eventually, I got more and more writing assignments, allowing me to give up cleaning and support myself entirely as a journalist.
JW: How did musicians in San Francisco figure out you had an ability to sing jazz?
TS: I didn’t really sing in San Francisco or know any musicians. I sang Cry Me A River one night at a local karaoke bar. Someone who was there with friends heard me and later called the bar to ask me out on a date. We went out as friends every Sunday to hear music. He would push me to sit in, which I mostly refused to do. But he thought it was ridiculous that I wasn’t doing it professionally. Soon we became a couple.
JW: Did he persuade you to get up on stage?
TS: Since he was a musicologist and a horrible music snob, I trusted him and began sitting in. We moved to New York in 1997 and, although we broke up at his instigation, he was still pushing me to sing. I went to the open mic at New York’s Cleopatra’s Needle every weekend and channeled my sadness singing torch songs. People would come up and ask where else they could see me perform. Eventually, I got a proper gig there. I definitely would not have been a professional singer if it hadn’t been for him.
JW: When did you study at the Manhattan School of Music?
TS: In 1998, I won a scholarship to MSM, but I had to miss the fall semester and go into the spring 1999 semester where I discovered they didn’t offer Theory 1 and Piano 1 in the spring. That had been the whole point for me. My friend, tuba player and baritone saxophonist Howard Johnson, said I didn’t need to go to school because I was a natural and could learn on the job. So, I left after that semester.
JW: How did you meet Mark Murphy?
TS: When I was at MSM, Mark came in and taught a master class. I had already interviewed him over the phone for a college paper. As soon as we met in class, it was as if we already knew each other. Later, I did a private workshop with him. Singer Mary Pearson, who was running Mark’s workshops in New York, called and said she was leaving and that Mark had specifically asked that I take over. I was honored and jumped at the opportunity. In return, I got one private lesson and one workshop a month with Mark for four years. He called me “Tessa Trueheart” and “My Tessa!” and “My granbaby!” And people would send me his emails and ask me to translate his jive talk. I just understood him, for some reason.
JW: Did Mark introduce you to Sheila Jordan?
TS: Mark went to Graz, Austria, for six months, so I asked Sheila Jordan if she’d like me to run workshops for her while Mark was away. She said yes. I used to say Mark was the sun—shining—and she was the moon—glowing. As a singer, she’s so expressive and authentic, and always sings in service of the song. I feel blessed to have spent so much time with Mark and Sheila. Not to mention that Sheila fixed me up with my future husband, drummer Billy Drummond.
JW: How did you get your first recording deal? Was it a hard session or did you figure it out quickly?
TS: In 2000, I made a demo at someone’s home studio to help me get gigs. It was four tracks—The Peacocks, Insensatez, Daydream and The Creator Has a Master Plan. On a whim, I sent it to Sony. I can’t imagine what I was thinking. I forgot about it until one day, as I was picking up my messages, a man with a French accent had left a message saying he was from Sony and that he wanted to hear me.
JW: Were you excited?
TS: I tried to put him off, but he said, “You can’t stop us from coming to the Cornelia Street Café,” where I was singing. One day I was on the subway feeling perfectly happy. Then I remembered the guy from Sony was coming that night to hear me sing. Instead of feeling thrilled I slumped in my seat. I have no idea why. Maybe because I struggled with depression back then. Anyway, they came, but I wasn’t ready, since it was my first listening-room gig.
JW: What did you do?
TS: After that, I had a couple of managers, one of whom held my CD for a year because he wanted to get me on a label but didn’t have time to present me. Meanwhile, people were asking me for an album, and I was impatient. So I put out Listen Love on my own in December 2004. Those were the days when you could easily sell 30 CDs in an evening. I sold 60 at my Rochester Jazz Festival debut. It’s a lot harder now that all music is free.
JW: How did you wind up on Venus?
TS: In 2008, the Japanese audiophile label, Venus Records, invited me to make Nights of Key Largo in New York. I had one rehearsal with pianist Kenny Werner, and we recorded the album. Producers Todd Barkan and Tetsuo Hara were in charge of everything else. And then San Francisco’s Motéma Music signed me to make Obsession in 2009. A couple of years later, I mentioned to Mr. Hara at Venus that I had fallen in love with Steve Kuhn’s version of Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor.
JW: What did he say?
TS: He suggested I record an entire album of classical pieces with my lyrics backed by the Steve Kuhn Trio. The label brought together tenor saxophonist Joel Frahm, vibraphonist Joe Locke, Gary Versace on accordion, Steve Kuhn (p) David Finck (b) Billy Drummond (d) for Beyond the Blue. It came out in Japan in 2011 and was licensed by Motéma Music for release in the U.S. in 2012.
JW: Who helped you the most?
TS: Queva Lutz, owner of the 55 Bar in New York, who later became a dear friend, gave me a regular monthly gig, “for the rest of both of our natural lives!” When she died in 2007, her son Scott took over. I had that gig for 17 years and got to workshop the music for nearly all my albums there. Then Covid arrived and the 55 Bar never really got back on its feet, eventually closing for good in 2022. It was weird not having the 55 to workshop my new release Shadows and Silence: The Erik Satie Project.
JW: Why Erik Satie for your new album?
TS: Around the time I first played with Luis Perdomo in 2019, I had four album ideas, including this one. Then my mum was diagnosed with a gigantic thoracic heart aneurysm. She was my first call of every day. Three very dear friends died—one from a stroke, one after a long-term battle with cancer and one very suddenly although, thankfully, I got to spend his last few days with him. They all had a huge impact on my music.
JW: How did your mom hold up?
TS: She kept failing and died last June. Then my dad started having memory issues. Billy and I got married, and Yasushi Kitamura, my bassist, had his first baby. Huge life things. All at once. So the Satie project picked itself. I had a lot to express, and Satie’s music is so mysterious and impressionistic that it lends itself to lyrical interpretations of these very deep themes. I think my whole life is in this album.
JW: How were you first introduced to his music?
TS: I may have first heard it on a British ad for Cadbury’s chocolate when I was a child. It’s the background music to so many seminal movies, including My Dinner With Andre, Man On Wire, Being There, The Royal Tenenbaums, About Schmidt and Chocolat. And it’s everywhere, even now. I’m currently reading Ian Penman’s new book, Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite. I think Satie would have approved of the book. It’s eccentric, like him.
JW: What fascinates you about him?
TS: I find his music very evocative. His modal compositions and the way he would seem to lay out one path and then take another, reminds me of Wayne Shorter. I was talking to a jazz musician the other day who used to play his pieces and she said that when Kind of Blue came out, she thought “This is just Erik Satie!” It sounds simple but it rewards your full attention. He wanted it to be “furniture music” that people talked over. But according to one of his friends, audiences were so bewitched by Satie’s music that he would have to go around telling them not to listen. I felt like I knew him. His world was the world of my childhood.
JW: What was most difficult about his music?
TS: It was tough to learn—or should I say, unlearn. Because it’s so ubiquitous, you think you know it. It’s only when you look at the actual music that you realize you don’t. It’s much harder to learn the correct melody when you’ve learned it wrong. But it’s so rewarding. There’s no way I could ever tire of Gnossienne No. 3.
JW: Did it take a long time to rehearse the songs?
TS: Luis and I met up four or five times to look at the charts and bat around ideas. I gave him the lyrics, and he came up with some truly gorgeous arrangements, particularly of Gnossiennes No. 1 and No. 3, which he wrote out so anyone could play them. Which was good because we only had one full band rehearsal in advance of the recording. In the studio, Billy came up with an idea for Gymnopedie No. 3 that required only one take. It was more of a “let’s see what happens” thing which worked. I love rehearsing, but getting everyone together in the same place at the same time is next to impossible for these in-demand guys.
JW: Four of the pieces on your new album aren’t Satie. Why did you choose these?
TS: Let’s take them one at a time. Ron Carter’s Mood struck me as Satie-esque, being very meditative and soothing. I love the hypnotic bass line and how the melody is like being rocked in a hammock in a garden somewhere. My lyric was inspired by something my son said when I was a bit down, that moods are just weather—some days are sunny, some not. He’s very wise. Next, Léo Ferré’s Avec le Temps. French singer Ferré wrote the lyrics, composed the music and recorded it in 1970. It’s a melodramatic song about giving up on love. How does it relate to Satie? Satie’s great love, Suzanne Valadon, was a painter, a former trapeze artist, an artist’s model, a teenage mother and a free spirit. Satie felt betrayed by her when she moved in with her lover two doors down from him. That was his only relationship. He never risked being in love again. And he never recovered emotionally.
JW: And the other two?
TS: ESP began as a shorthand acronym for Erik Satie Project. Then I thought it would be fun to pay tribute to Satie’s influence on 20th century music, especially jazz, by recording Wayne Shorter’s ESP, with Cassandra Wilson’s lyric. Jacques Brel and Rod McKuen’s If You Go Away (Ne Me Quitte Pas) is the ultimate breakup song. Satie had a difficult childhood. His mother and sister died when he was 6. Satie and his brother were then sent to live with their grandmother, who subsequently drowned. His early years gave him a need, I think, to pin down the unpindownable. Impossible. So he was probably right to stay single.
JW: Speaking of couples, how did you and Billy meet?
TS: I threw Sheila Jordan a 77th birthday party at New York’s Sweet Rhythm in 2005. Billy was in her band. When I introduced myself, he said: “Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” No one else had ever said that to me, so it stuck in my mind. Then a couple of years later, maybe in 2007, Sheila called me out of the blue and asked me what I thought of him. I remembered him only because of that. Otherwise, I hadn’t thought of him at all.
JW: Did Sheila nudge?
TS: She said she had a hunch we’d like each other and that I should call him for a gig. It took another year for us to be in the same place at the same time. I hired him for a gig at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in 2008 and he invited me to his house in New Jersey to listen to an album, which is absolutely absurd, in retrospect. I took the bus and was three hours late because I am a directional dyslexic. I got lost at the Port Authority Terminal in Manhattan. He cooked dinner for me.
JW: So you two were getting close.
TS: We were. After the second night of the gig, I invited him to hang at the Jazz Standard with friends. He wasn’t sure because his son, then 9, was at the neighbor’s house. But saxophonist and flutist Don Braden, who was on the gig and overheard the exchange, said “What! Are you nuts?” So, Billy asked if the neighbors could keep his son overnight and they said yes. We were out until 5 a.m. The following week we had our first date and have been together ever since. It’s been 17 years, and every day I bless Sheila for putting us together.
JW: What’s on your jazz horizon?
TS: My next project is a secret. I kept the Satie idea secret for about three years. I find if I talk about things in advance, I don’t do them because I’ve already done them in my mind. I’ve also been asked to do a standards EP, which would be fun, since I don’t usually record standards. Mum would be pleased.
JazzWax tracks: You'll find Tessa Souter's Shadows and Silence: The Erik Satie Project (Noanara) at most major streaming platforms and here.
JazzWax clip: Here's A Song for You (Gnossienne No. 1)—music by Erik Satie, lyrics by Tessa Souter and arrangement by Luis Perdomo...
