Helm, Lenora Zenzalai and Tribe Jazz Orchestra Nonet - Journeywoman [CD]

Hailed by Jazziz magazine as the ”voice of her generation” and a “national treasure,” Chicago-born, Durham, North Carolina-based Dr. Lenora Zenzalai Helm is a jazz vocal musician, composer, lyricist, bandleader, and a dedicated educator at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). Helm encompasses all of the inventions and dimensions of jazz and the African Diaspora on her new recording, Journeywoman, featuring her Tribe Jazz Orchestra Nonet. Helm’s new CD, her eighth as a leader, is a compelling 65-minute, multi-movement 12-track work, where she sings about the life of an allegorical woman named Journey, and her struggles with abuse, birth, death, self-definition and her victories through self-love, perseverance, and affirmation. Recorded in 2022, on her Zenzalai Music Records label, Helm originally composed Journeywoman in 2003, for a commission for Chamber Music America's New Jazz Works grant (the first African American female vocalist recipient,) funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and for the next two decades she augmented and rearranged the work into its current form, buoyed by the perspective of time. Helm’s Tribe Jazz Orchestra, founded in 2019, is configured into a harmonically nuanced and rhythmically nimble, nine-piece nonet consisting of several NCCU educators and local musicians