Georgia Anne Muldrow Explores Her Jazz Legacy As Jyoti

From funk and soul to hip-hop and electronic music, Georgia Anne Muldrow has rarely limited herself to any one particular genre. Over the course of a broad discography spanning nearly two decades, she’s regularly touched upon and frequently blended all of these and more for releases on labels like Mello Music Group and Stones Throw, as well as her own SomeOthaShip Connect label.

Her latest album Mama, You Can Bet! comes under the name Jyoti, an infrequently used moniker that has generally served to explore the jazzier side of her sonic spectrum. As the daughter of two musical parents—her father the jazz guitarist Ronald Muldrow and her mother singer-songwriter/composer Rickie Byars—her uniquely suited background and continued progression as an artist make the record a sublimely compelling listen.

Released under her own name, her 2018 album Overload for Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint earned Muldrow a Grammy nomination in the Best Urban Contemporary category. Though the nod was admittedly unexpected and her record ultimately lost to Lizzo’s Cuz I Love You, she looks back on it with fondness for the surreal experience. “It was fun to bring my mom there and have a walk,” she says over the phone about attending the red carpeted festivities back in January. “We definitely gave our telecast tickets to some homeless people.”

It's been nearly seven years since the last project under your Jyoti moniker. What brought you back to it? 

Sometimes I want to be doing things that are more free. I do whatever I want; that's the rule. But there's this part of me that is greatly informed by improvised music. Jazz, as we call it today, some people call it Black American music, some people call it American music, music of the diaspora, Pan-African—it's all types of different things. It's a more responsive forum for my emotions.

And how has jazz informed your creative process?

That's like asking how water informs a fish. It's something I was born into for sure, just like with the funk and everything else. Being immersed in it, in the world of Art Blakey’s music, Max Roach’s music, Wes Montgomery’s music, my father's music. That's the music he played. We weren't allowed at that time to touch the radio dial in the car. We weren't allowed to touch the radio in the house. A lot of us access music for the first time through a parent or through whoever our guardians were because we didn't have no tablet, you feel me? You got a chance to study your parents. Watching my father enjoy music, and seeing what he enjoyed about the music he listened to, taught me a lot about who he was, the part that he would not openly share. Certain songs, the way the mix will sound, the way the groove is sounding, the harmonic structures, all of those turned into language for me at a very early age. So I access it in the same way to be able to get to feelings I feel inside to you guys. Trying to name what you feel, some people are very good at summing it up. But for those whose feelings got colors and shadows, sometimes music is the only thing that can explain it.

Jyoti, that body of work, allows me to dive into this beautiful well of my childhood, my young adulthood, my teenage life, trying to understand my father, trying to know him better and, at the same time, working out my feelings about him. And my mom, the way she used chords and stuff in the music that she's doing, both of them being really chord savvy people, that's what's made me my ear just naturally hear something. It's not like I'm trying to be hip. The point is that it's something natural. There's a natural idea that comes to a composer. In the world that I've been raised in, the culture I've been raised in, that has been a very valid form of communication, just as talking with you now. That's the way I raise my kids with music that's not even recorded. We just talk in music sometimes. It's like the second language of the home—the first language of the home and English as a second language, for sure, when you have jazz-informed parents. 

One of the things that differentiates this new album from 2013’s Denderah is the increased use of voice and, in particular, singing. What prompted you to include more of a vocal presence on this album? 

It was just a metamorphosis going on inside of me where I want to be more free. I want to sing where my voice carries me and this allows me to do that. Since Denderah, the deal has been like, how can I merge these worlds into a performance? I don't want to be singing in the same song the same way for 35 years. I don't. I'm willing to sacrifice the audience that would have me do that. I love to reinvent music, reinvent a song. I was raised to do that, to make it a new experience every time. I was trained to do that. You gotta have a certain amount of undifferentiated chaos in your sound. You gotta have a certain percentage of it so that it can engage the chaos in other people.

Is that also kind of why you reached for those Charlie Mingus compositions “Bemoanable Lady” and “Fables of Faubus” for the album? 

Oh yeah! I totally resonate with his stuff because [of] his honesty. His honesty was his music and his honesty was what he’d feel, his honesty about the time he had to live in. All those things, it equates to a certain type of innocence. That don’t mean do no harm. Humans do harm—period. But just the innocence in as much as that he wants you to experience who he really is and not who he thinks you’ll like. It comes out in his music with the melodies that he has, with the trajectory of rhythm and harmony that accompany that melody. It's very legit, but then it's very pure.

Your Overload full-length for Brainfeeder earned a Grammy nomination for Best Urban Contemporary Album. I’m assuming your process has never been about that sort of recognization as an aim, correct?

It's definitely never been the goal. You're good to pick that one up.

You did it on your own terms, the way you wanted to do it, and put out into the world. So what's that experience like then for you being nominated for Grammy in that context? 

It was unexpected to say the least. I know some folks that really have a team and they write down goals and complete their tasks so that they can manifest and bring those goals to life. They really are pushing to best by, like, international standards. For real, I just want my mom to smile and be proud of me. I want my kids to be proud of me, to think I'm cool, maybe, you know, sometimes. And those things kind of make your kids think that you might be cool. At the same time, there is nothing like playing in Leimert Park and the elders who you've looked up to do music are coming up to going, I've heard your work, I think it’s wonderful. When I get that, that does something for my soul. Like when my elders, I just don't remember. My uncles or aunties can look at my work and smile. It brings a lot of honor to my soul. It lets me know that it’s needed, it's important. Not so much that it's the best, but that there's a place for it.

You see somebody like Keb’ Mo’ on the red carpet and then you feel like it's less strange for you then. He played on some of my mom’s records, you know what I'm saying? I got a chance to hear that banjo, all the heritage he played. And so to see him in a different place and we see each other, I like that. I like seeing my brothers and sisters there, and celebrating each other while we're there. We know that the press unfortunately is only looking at a few people, because that's the nature of the celebrity culture, of the investments that very large companies invest into a single human being in order to be better than all. It's a model that I feel is clunky, personally. I feel like it needs to be streamlined and updated. And it is updating itself, more and more each day. So I feel like, that nomination let me know that certain things may be changing. 

Something particularly notable is that the award category you were nominated in had its name changed recently. In the light of the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death, it’s now become Best Progressive R&B Album.

Yeah! We we kicked up some dust about that urban. I was part of the gang that was doing that, definitely was getting that. [laughs] I was kicking up a lot of dust, because I think that it just means n*****. I feel like Tyler [The Creator] said it really well. I mean, it's going to take more than just renaming stuff. It's going to take people really getting into the heart of the matter. And if you’re calling it progressive R&B, really look into that field and really look into the pioneers of the sounds that are there. I feel like that's good though. I think that that's very good though. We’re prog-R&B!