Beth Peerless, Where it’s at: Ledisi returns to Jazz Fest lineup

Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, author and actress Ledisi is back at the 64th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival for a third time. Her headlining Saturday performance at the Sept. 24-26 festival will reintroduce her prodigious vocal talents to an audience that may or may not remember when she was last in town.

In 2005, the New Orleans-born, Oakland-raised artist first graced the arena’s Jimmy Lyons Stage as a guest of guitarist Larry Carlton. She also appeared at the more intimate Garden Stage where she found the shared joy and connection with the audience. Returning in 2008, she performed a varied set of R&B songs she’s known for and other jazz-infused tunes on both the Jimmy Lyons Stage and Garden Stage.

The Ledisi connection goes deeper though. It was at the 1999 Big Sur Jazz Festival that she first performed in the Monterey Bay Area for a mostly local audience at the beloved, now-defunct jazz party along the coast. We’re talking 22 years ago and despite the fog that has since settled in our minds, Ledisi and I reminisced in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles about the late trumpeter Roy Hargrove coming to join her band for a jam session at the Fernwood concert. And her set on the patio at Nepenthe. (Disclosure: I volunteered as a PR person and artistic director for the festival for most of its existence.)

“I had never been there in my life,” Ledisi said. “I was like gasping, ‘This is nature. We get to play under the sky.’ The people were receptive, they were dancing. They didn’t just respond with a clap, they all would be jumping up and down. We had a blast man!”

At that time, Ledisi was still primarily known locally in the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area and hadn’t yet recorded her first album “Soulsinger” that came out in 2000. Monterey Jazz Festival’s Stage Manager Emeritus and the Big Sur Festival Founder, the late Paul Vieregge, discovered her in the fertile San Francisco “Acid Jazz” scene of the mid-1990s which also produced early career success for jazz artists Charlie Hunter, Scott Amendola, Will Bernard, and John Schott (T.J. Kirk), among many other bands.

“I was doing the Elbo Room, the Black Cat, Up and Down Club, and then Rasselas, and Cafe DuNord,” she said. “I was at the Elbo Room where I would open for Charlie Hunter sometimes until I could finally get my own gig. Sly Five was the first band I was with; we would open for Incognito, the Brand New Heavies, and the Broun Fellinis. I would go to San Jose and do some gigs down there. It was all up and through there, all the way to Monterey, Big Sur, and I did Santa Cruz a lot. Yeah, that was the Acid Jazz time, and it was all bands back then. No DJs.”

She’s come a long way since those early days, releasing 11 full-length albums, garnering 13 Grammy nominations and winning one this year for the song “Anything For You” off the album “The Wild Card,” her 2020 debut recording on her own label Listen Back Entertainment. The majority of her recordings before that were on major label Verve and its feeder subsidiary Verve Forecast. The first two records, “Soulsinger” and “Feeling Orange But Sometimes Blue” came out on LeSun Records, the indie label she and her bandmate and writing partner Sundra Manning formed to get things rolling. Ledisi was also performing in the perennial theater favorite Beach Blanket Babylon in North Beach, at the same time she worked as a waitress at Max’s Opera Cafe.

“Beach Blanket taught me about theater, how to reach past the first three rows,” she said. “And look beyond the three rows that just stare at you and do nothing. There’s a whole bunch of audience behind that. They taught me about the whole room. I got my training in stage presence from Beach Blanket. But I was doing theater before. That’s how they found me. I was doing ‘The Wiz’ in Antioch Community Theater.”

It’s a wonder she was able to pull off everything she was working at, but her hard work and determination, not to mention her gorgeous and soulful voice, opened doors for her and with the help of several career connections, got her in touch with the legendary producer Rex Rideout, who she continues to work with to this day. Ledisi is best known as a fantastic R&B singer, but she’s got jazz chops and with those she’s made inroads to places that helped her increase her loyal fan base.

“I kept begging to play Yoshi’s (in Oakland, considered one of the world’s most respected jazz venues) and when I had the first album ready they finally let me do a weekend there and we sold out all the shows,” she said with pride. “And I was one of the first R&B artists locally to play Yoshi’s. It was really elite back then when it was only jazz. So I opened that door to let R&B in there. I kept telling them I’d do jazz, too. I know how to do it, just let me in. But locally it was hard to get the same respect that they gave to artists that toured nationally or internationally.”

As it is for most artists, it’s a hard path to the top and there’s always going to be ups and downs. Perseverance and a strong work ethic have gotten Ledisi to a place in her career where she’s received numerous awards for her singing and acting, and she’s been asked to perform with major music icons such as Herbie Hancock and Patti Austin. She counts among her fans the Obamas, and music legends such as the late Prince, Patti LaBelle, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan and many more. In acting she’s had the good fortune to land a role in the Oscar-nominated movie “Selma’ (2015), portraying the great Mahalia Jackson. And delivering a notable performance in Gabourney Sidibe’s film “The Tale Of Four.” Her first major television role was playing the legendary Patti LaBelle on the hit BET series “American Soul.” The BET original movie “Twice Bitten” was broadcast just last week with Ledisi in a starring role.

For her performance at the 64th Monterey Jazz Festival, she’s bringing her quartet and background singer to deliver a varied set of music that defines her as an artist. Which means indefinable because she can do it all.

“So I’m going to do my R&B and a little bit of my jazz from my current ‘Ledisi Sings Nina.’ It’s going to also have my whole range of what I love about music. That’s what I love about Monterey. Come as you are. Monterey did not ask for a specific thing,” she said.

For sure what you’ll get is 100% gold plated Ledisi. As a performer, she will deliver not only an exciting show, but she’ll deliver her heart and soul.

“Everything I do I commit to it. I study. I make sure it means something. I’m transparent and I’m not going to be fake. I’m still the same,” she confided in regards to her rise in stature. “I’m just more makeup, more hair maybe, a little thicker and chunkier in certain spots, but it’s still me. I don’t know what I’m doing exactly, but I’m in here.

“My thing is, ‘Did I do my work? Am I leaving behind a legacy that will always be remembered?’ That’s the part I’m focused on. My activism is to activate you to be inspired by me. That the journey is what you make it, not what other people say you gonna be.”