Shakura
Shakura S'Aida will be a featured artist at the upcoming Women's Blues Revue November 22 at The Music Hall. Photo by Laurie Januska
Shakura S'Aida says she's back again doing what she's supposed to do, singing the blues and wearing her soul on her sleeve.
An energetic singer with considerable theatrical flair and a supple voice that's capable of soaring, S'Aida mesmerized the Harbourfront Centre audience during her appearance with Saturday Night Fish Fry at the Labatt Blues Festival last July. She brings that same magic to the upcoming Women's Blues Revue, which takes place at The Music Hall on November 22.
S'Aida recently returned to the clubs to sing blues after spending time focusing on her acting career. "I've come back to doing what I love to do," she says.
She loves the blues for its honesty and says, "If you go by what Mahalia Jackson said, it's songs of despair. I feel it's just the opposite."
For three years, S'Aida performed weekly at the late, great Blues on Bellair, with bassist Eric Soostar and guitarist Brook Blackburn. She says the club's owners, Diane and Peter Jermyn, gave the trio complete musical freedom and as a result she learned a lot.
A veteran of the R&B circuit, the 38-year-old singer got a chance to explore acoustic music at the club. "We did exactly what we wanted to do or needed to do, so it became an incredible place of experimentation and sound," she says.
Until her gig at Blues on Bellair, working in a trio, S'Aida had been unable to hear the bass in her bands because she's partially deaf. At the club, though, she heard the bass for the first time ever. "I was able to concentrate, week after week, on the bass," she says.
Since last January, S'Aida has been singing with Saturday Night Fish Fry, a nine-piece band that can take an audience on a roller-coaster ride of sound. After years of leading her own bands and choosing her own material, she says working with Fish Fry is a major change for her.
The band's pianist/vocalist, Bill King, selects the classic blues songs S'Aida sings with the band and he expects her vocals to be as authentic as possible. "I try to honour that because it's really beautiful. To be able to sing with horns and keep it authentic as possible, it's a challenge."
S'Aida says she has learned about a whole new kind of music working with King. She doesn't spend much time studying and analyzing singers herself and doesn't own many CDs, except for everything by her favourite artists such as Nina Simone.
Working with King, S'Aida says she was taken aback at first when he told her she was singing the wrong note. "What he's given me is a new way of looking at my voice, and at performing." She says she's also learned about discipline, adding that King's standards are high. "He expects the best, and rightfully so."
King says S'Aida is a great blues singer whose vocal strengths include range, clarity and tone of voice, and that she is a first-rate entertainer. At Harbourfront Centre, S'Aida flirtatiously pulled three men on stage to sing with her, a performance that had the audience in an uproar.
King and S'Aida enjoy the give and take of singing with each other and usually perform a duet at Fish Fry shows. "There are times I set up these duets and urge her to get into playacting as if a relationship has gone bad. She can give as well as receive," he says. "The beauty of the exercise is it presses both of us to reach for things we may be too cautious about - notes and improvised lyrics."
When S'Aida chooses material for her own shows, without Fish Fry, she looks for songs that people can relate to easily, as well as sincerity and words that mean something. "Every song I sing," she says, "I can picture a story, whether I'm by myself or I bring people up."
S'Aida has done some songwriting and plans to perform one of her original tunes at the Women's Blues Revue.
She feels out an audience when she performs and "if the audience's energy is different, then I change what I do," she says, adding that she can't change what she does with Fish Fry.
S'Aida's influences include Salome Bey, Etta James and Jackie , singers who are dynamic performers as well as gifted vocalists.
Originally from Brooklyn, New York, S'Aida settled in Toronto with her parents and sister in the late 1970s. She says her family came to the city because it's a good place to live.
She studied music and performance at Sheridan College for a year and has trained with various people, including, most recently, Elaine Overholt, the vocal coach of the movie Chicago.
At 19, S'Aida started going to jam sessions where she met some of her mentors, including the B3 organ player John T. Davis - one of the best she's ever played with, she says - and drummer Norm Villeneuve.
Currently, for Saturday Night Fish Fry, S'Aida is learning new material, provided by blues historian Eddy B., from recordings made by young singers on 78s and 45s in the 1940s and '50s. King is working on the arrangements and by late winter Fish Fry should have a new two-hour show.
- Ruth Schweitzer