Tessa Souter: Singing Her Way to Happiness

The English/Trinidadian artist is a bona fide treasure—consummate stage presence, captivating singer, accomplished songwriter. Arriving in New York in 2009 from England, Souter studied at the Manhattan School of Music while taking a masterclass with Mark Murphy. Starting with open mic sessions, she soon began making a name for herself on the scene, bringing an appealing combination of lightness and depth to her music, singing in a bright, clear voice. She debuted in 2004 with Listen Love (Nara Music, 2004), backed by an agile band including her friend Mark Berman on piano, then four years later released Nights in Key Largo (Venus Records, 2008) and then Obsession (Motéma Music, 2009) before offering Beyond the Blue (Motéma Music, 2012), which showcased her original lyrics as well as her remarkable dexterity of voice. The awards began flowing in.

In June of 2025, after close to twenty years of knitting together the songs, she released Shadows and Silence: The Erik Satie Project  (Noanara, 2025), which has elevated Souter's musical storytelling to another level. "Music is my driving force, the expression I feel the most resemblant of our essence as human beings," said the New York resident. "I've found my deepest moments of connection, reflection and joy through music." One could easily conjure the image of Saint Valentine, shoulders swaying imperceptibly to the intriguing rhythms of Souter's band. The sagacious listener might know that her lyricism is no mere scribblings of a dilettante poet. To quote Daryl Hall: "She lets the music groove by taking it nice and smooth."

Souter heard French singer Anne Ducros' wordless interpretation of "Gnossienne No. 1" on her album Piano, Piano (Dreyfuss Jazz, 2005), and that ignited a spark in her that would smolder as she set aside time to create the Satie project. "Holding Onto Beauty (Gnossienne No. 3)," arranged by pianist Luis Perdomo, acts as the spiritual center of the album. In the glowing embers of the days since I first met you—trying to remember all the ways I won't forget you.It is a tribute to three important men in her life—husband and drummer Billy Drummond; her birth father as well as her adopted father, the former who died of Alzheimer's and the latter burdened with memory loss.

There is a dollop of Joni Mitchell-style lyrics in Souter's aural calligraphies, evocative and clever, emanating from a vibrant voice as clear as a bottle of designer water. Apparent in the following Q&A interview through Zoom is her directness and humor over what has been an astonishing journey through life, proof for the axiom that anyone has the ability to be what they want to become, no matter the circumstances or obstacles in the pathway.

All About Jazz: Before we get into your music and the Satie project, I'm curious about your family. Your father, for example, who you did not meet until age 28. (She brings out pictures of assorted family members.)

Tessa Souter: This is him when he was a little boy, pretty dark-skinned. And this is my dad who brought me up. I was with him since birth. He ended up looking like Einstein. I had thought my father was my real father until I was about 11 or 12, and then my parents got divorced. All this was sort of secretly going on without my brother and my knowledge. Anyway, it was my mom that wanted to break up as far as I can make out because she was a very wild and free type person. One day when she was cross with him, she told me that he wasn't my father. And then I think she felt regret having told me and couldn't take it back because I thought immediately, aha, so this is why I have a tan, because when I was younger, I was teased a lot at school for being brown.

So that was that until I was 28, and I was looking in the telephone directory one day. She had told me his full name, and his was the only one in the book because he'd taken his mother's maiden name and added it to his father's name, which was Kelly. Otherwise, I would never have found him. How many Kellys must there have been in the telephone directory?

AAJ: But you never went to the Caribbean to meet your birth father?

TS: That's right. I'd spent 28 years being one thing, and then I still have people who can't quite get it in their head that I'm bi-racial. People have even said racist things to me, not about me, and I've said, well, wait a minute, you do realize that my father is black? And they go, oh yeah, we don't mean you. But when I arrived in America, I noticed that it was everywhere. There are articles about race in the New Yorker and the New York Times. I mean, it's like a national obsession with Americans. That put it in my face because in England, I may have seen one homeless black person the whole time I was there. When I went to San Francisco, it seemed the majority of homeless were black.

I had to think, well, what's going on here? So, I read a lot of the history to understand where all this had come from, what had led to the situation that we are in now. And then I reinterpreted songs thinking, let's make these messages palatable by cloaking them in other songs. So "Lonely Woman," I interpreted as the story of two slaves who were separated, and "A Taste of Honey I interpreted as sung by a woman who came home from working during the day in the fields and discovered her husband had been kidnapped from Africa. And I start with an African song.

AAJ: How did "Reynardine" from Pictures in Back and White (Noa Records, 2018) fit into the story?

TS: To be honest, "Reynardine" was a bit of a reach. I just love that song. I was obsessed with Sandy Denny, who I discovered when I was 14. And I felt like since the album was kind of about me and being bi-racial, that was fair enough. That's what I was singing when I was 14, from the album Liege and Lief (Island, 1969), which is an amazing album. I still listen to it.

AAJ: What about the medley, "Dancing Girl" with "Where the Streets Have No Name?"

TS: I loved the first half of the medley by Terry Callier. The second half just didn't resonate with me. I replaced it with "Where the Streets Have No Name" because that reminded me of Africa, places where some streets actually don't have names. There might be an address, and it's opposite the Shell station. It's got a disruptive history. That was sort of an anti-war song.

I've been noticing, and it's very interesting to me how people have their own interpretations. I remember years and years ago reading an interview with Tom Stoppard, and somebody had interpreted one of the characters in his play or speech in the play as one thing. Stoppard said, "Well, no, I wasn't thinking that. However, that's a totally valid interpretation because who knows what the subconscious is." So probably it did have something to do with my peripatetic childhood.

AAJ: I understand you were named after a character in a novel.

TS: Yes, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. That was my mom. I had narrowly escaping being named Bathsheba, which she read when I was six weeks old. It was too late. Oh, thank you. There is a God.

AAJ: The instrumentation on Pictures in Black and White is unexpected at times, like the cello part by Dana Leong on "A Taste of Honey."

TS: He is someone I was very comfortable with. We've done a lot of duo gigs over the years. He's in China now, I think, though I can't quite work out where.

AAJ: Yotam Silberstein does amazing work on guitar.

TS: You can really hear his love of Brazilian music in his playing, especially on my album, because he's using an acoustic guitar. Not all the time, but yeah, that was a great band. Yasushi Nakamura is a great bassist who went to Julliard, so he comes from the classical tradition. He can bow beautifully.

AAJ: You do play piano though not on record. When did you begin with the piano?

TS: I started playing piano when I was about eight. I went to Rudolph Steiner School. My brother and I were sent to a boarding school—I was eight and he was seven—hand we were only there two years because our parents weren't rich and couldn't afford to keep us there. They were probably paying off that bill for many years. But anyway, we went to that school and it was very arts oriented. I had a piano teacher called Ms. Jacobs, who I was absolutely terrified of. To tell the truth, she was often mean. She had this beautiful multi-stringed, turquoise necklace with tiny little beads and gray hair, which was severely styled. I didn't have a piano, so I have no idea how I was expected to practice.

My brother and I lived with this other family for the first two terms, and I certainly don't remember them ever telling me I should be practicing. Then when we moved into the boarding house, there wasn't even a piano there. But I continued with it. When we left that school, I had a new teacher called Mrs. Muirhead, who was lovely. She is the person who encouraged me to give up the piano because I never practiced and take up singing. She heard my voice during one of the exams.

AAJ: You also learned to play guitar.

TS: Yes, my mom had a guitar. In fact, my mom died recently, so I inherited quite a lot of her little things that I wanted. One of them was a music book with staves, and it just touched me so much that my mom in her nineties was dabbling with learning to read music. She was a wonderful singer and very expressive. She would pick up things and drop them all the time, and one of those was a guitar. My best friend at the time was learning the guitar at a school called Dartington Hall. This was when we were in Devon. So, I started playing mom's guitar, and I pretty much taught myself to play. My friend showed me a few chords, and all I really wanted to do with it was accompany myself and that was easy. I was finger-picking, not strumming, so it didn't really matter what chords I was holding on some level, as long as the thing I was plucking sounded right.

AAJ: You can do so much more on guitar with finger-picking, at least that has been my experience.

TS: Forget the plectrum. I don't know how people do that. I think that about playing the piano. I wanted to learn the piano, but I didn't want to go through all the boring old scales and all that. Why don't you just give me a song and I will learn to accompany myself on it. That would be a good way.

AAJ: What type of music first attracted you? In other words, your first music crush.

TS: My mom used to have me sing songs when I was very little, probably three or four. They were just songs that we heard on the radio, like Jim Reeves. He had a song called "He'll Have To Go," which was hysterical that a little 3-year-old would be singing about a man trying to tell some woman that her boyfriend should skip. When I was four, the first record I asked my mom to buy was Helen Shapiro. She had a song called "Walking Back to Happiness." Many years later, not that long ago, I found out that she was a teenager at the time. As a mother, I know that little children are obsessed with teenagers, so it makes total sense to me that I would've fallen in love with Helen Shapiro.

AAJ: You left home when you were a teenager. What brought that about?

TS: It was four months before my 16th birthday—a moment of silence. Not long after I had my son. Well, my mom wasn't really great with kids, especially since I have another brother who's fifteen years younger than me, and he and I had very similar experiences. When we got to about eleven or twelve, she was combative, shall we say. I think she felt a little resentful at the curtailment of her freedom. She was somebody who really needed to be free and having kids was probably, in those days, people didn't really choose so much. They just had them and then they did their best. My home life was difficult, and it wasn't long before found out that my father wasn't my father. So, I didn't feel that I could just go and move in with him because we never discussed it. That was the other thing. In typical British style, it was never brought up again, ever. He and I never discussed it until I was about 30. I recently wrote him a letter telling him how important he was to me, just in case he didn't know.

You see, my mom was very attractive, sexy actually, and she was very distracted by men wanting to have a relationship with her or her wanting to have relationships with them. So, we were a little bit in the way. And then when I was the only one left at home, my brother went to live with my dad. It became more noticeable.

AAJ: What prompted you to move to the US?

TS: I had broken up with my second husband, and I didn't really have anywhere to stay. My mom had an apartment in London, but she didn't really want me to be staying there. But anyway, a friend of mine who I'd worked with as an editor, invited me to come and visit in San Francisco. And then another friend, this incredible photojournalist called Stefan Laurent, had started a magazine in England called Picture Post, which was kind of like Life Magazine. He was a Hungarian Jew, half Jewish, half Catholic, who had been imprisoned by Hitler for six months. He was a fascinating character working for this magazine at the time called Munich Illustration or something like that. I had interviewed him for a magazine called The Sunday Correspondent. I was a journalist in those days, and this was my first major piece so I did a lot of research on him. And at the time, I was kind of bored with journalism. I was like, you know what? I'm not interested in interviewing celebrities and their silliness. I didn't want to read articles about celebrities let alone want to write them.

But while doing this research, I discovered he was incredibly interesting. In his magazine, he'd have stories about people, like he wanted to know what it was like to be a cleaning lady. Fascinating, real-life stuff. And I thought, maybe I can carry on doing this journalism thing if it could be interesting like that. Sadly, my story came out on Sunday, and the magazine folded along with my story. I sent him a copy because the layout had been done and he befriended me, wrote to me regularly and said you should come and visit. He was 96 and was living in Lenox, Massachusetts. He took me to see the opera, but he was furious and we had to walk out because it was so bad. It was a local troupe. He was friends with Lottie Lenya and all these artists. Anyway, we came home and he put the record on and stood and conducted the record. He was quite the character.

AAJ: So you remained in the States?

TS: I spent a week with him then a week with another friend in New York. Then I went to spend another week with my friend in San Francisco, and I didn't feel like going home afterwards. He said, well, you can stay and sleep on the sofa as long as you like. It wasn't a plan, and I didn't really think I was going to stay. Actually, quite a few people I know who ended up living here had come not planning to stay; they just came. Somehow, especially San Francisco, once it's got its claws into you, there's no escaping.

AAJ: You went to music school in New York?

TS: I went to Manhattan School of Music for one semester only where I met Mark Murphy. He came in to do a workshop and I had interviewed him on the phone for a paper. At this workshop, it felt like we already knew each other. A friend called me who was running his workshops and asked me if I wanted to do a class. Sure, let me do it. So, I went along to the masterclass and subsequently Mark asked if I wanted to continue because my friend was going to leave. So I took over and ran his workshops for four years, and in return, I got his mentorship with a lesson in the workshop every month and a one-on-one every month, which was pretty incredible. He said, you can't teach people to sing; they can either sing or they can't, but what you can do is tweak. He made me into more of a perfectionist. I mean, really, it's a horrible disease. And he taught me to go past that a little bit.

AAJ: Were you singing before going to that school?

TS: I was in San Francisco, actually. I'd always sung, and I was introduced to the music of Milton Nascimento when I was in my early thirties. I was singing along with that, loved it. Not the words, of course, because they're Portuguese. Then I got interested in jazz in my late twenties, again, not imagining that I would ever do it as a career, I just did it. But whenever I did sing, people would always make comments. When I was at this karaoke bar of all places, I only went to it about four times in my life, and one of the times there was somebody there who became a very good friend of mine who was a musicologist. He teaches at Reed College now. He heard me sing and called the bar and asked me to go out with him. So, we went out every Sunday to hear music, and he would be bullying me every week to go and ask if I could sit in.

I'd be like, no, no, I can't. I was terribly scared. We got into a relationship, and then he fell out of love, I guess, but still was always interested in my music because I knew him so well. I knew he was a horrible snob, and if I had been a bad singer, he wouldn't have let me go anywhere near a stage, let alone be pushing me onto one. That gave me encouragement, and I, in a way, started to be a singer because I wanted to win back his love, which I'm super glad I didn't because I'm now very happily married. I would sing at open mics and things. Actually, there was this guy called David Lahm whose mother is Dorothy Fields. His wife had a bar called Judy's, which was a cabaret room where they also did open mic. I sang around midnight and afterwards, Lahm, who was playing the piano, came up to me and said, you know what? You are not a cabaret singer. You are a jazz singer, and you should go to the jazz jams. Really? I didn't know, so I started doing that.

AAJ: Let's jump ahead to when you made your first record. That was Listen Love.

TS: I was at a gig at the 55 Bar, which was this amazing iconic dive bar for jazz in the Village run by this woman called Eva Lutz. She gave me this gig, she said, for the rest of our natural lives, until Covid happened. Basically, I had that gig every months for 17 years. She made the club into a listening room. People could come for free. Pass the hat.

When you are playing regularly like that, people have ideas for you. They come up to you or send a note saying, you should do this song or that song, or you should record this song one day. And I thought, okay, let me try and do a recording. I had a wonderful group of musicians, and they did it super cheap. I went into the studio initially in 2002 and recorded a bunch of songs. Then I went back again in 2004 and did some more. The first thing was having a 4-song EP, which I had made to get gigs with, and that was recorded with a pianist called Mark Berman. I was in a hurry and it was good because I sold a lot of them just on the bandstand. My first gig at Rochester International Jazz Festival, I sold sixty just in one night.

AAJ: The next one took four years to get out—Nights of Key Largo.

TS: That's partly because I was getting more and more taken with and distracted by becoming a musician. I let my journalism fall by the wayside outside of the odd piece, but not enough to really live on. I saw a friend who came to see me in London with their little boy who was then six, and he heard me singing, came up to me and said, are you a millionaire? He was super excited, so sad to say, no, darling, I'm a jazz singer. It really is a question of not having the funds. It's quite expensive to go into the studio to hire musicians, even if musicians are willing to do it with you for a lot less than they're worth.

Todd Barkan co-produced the album with Tetsuo Hara, who had heard Listen Love and said he would really like to hear me with a whole band. My albums are usually very sparse in terms of instrumentation. He put together the band. I wanted to play with Kenny Werner, who I'd always admired, and everybody was really marvelous. I chose the songs I wanted to do, and Mr. Hara chose some others, and that was it, but it only came out in Japan. It's available now here. And I put out Obsession with them, which they again paid for. And then Mr. Hara wanted me to do another album, which was Beyond the Blue. I had been listening to Steve Kuhn, who's probably one of my favorite ever pianists.

It is ridiculous how incredible he is. My husband plays with Steve and was in his trio for twenty years or so. Anyway, I had written to Mr. Hara and said I'd been listening to Steve's album, the classical album, and it's so beautiful. He wrote back and said, you've just given me the idea for your next album. Why don't you do an album of classical repertoire with your lyrics? I have no idea why he thought of me doing the lyrics. He doesn't really speak English or know me necessarily as a lyricist, although I have been writing notes for a long time. They added Joe Locke, Gary Versace and Joel Frahm, who was on the previous album. Three songs were done—"Baubles, Bangles and Beads," "My Reverie" and "The Lamp is Low," and then I added nine more with my lyrics.

AAJ: Since you mentioned classical, this would a good time to segue into your latest recording, Shadows and Silence: The Erik Satie Project. How long was this project in planning?

TS: For some time, not sure how long. I heard a beautiful vocal improv version of one song, "Gnossienne No. 1," and started writing a lyric. I had been listening to that quite a lot over the years, the Satie, but I also loved the version by Anne Ducros. During the pandemic, I had three ideas for albums, and I couldn't choose which one I was going to do. I picked the Satie for no real reason, just like that, meenie miney mo.

Then I started really listening and investigating. I've got probably 10 books about Satie, and I had to go on YouTube to find music that I could resonate to emotionally. I guess from beginning to end, I probably spent four years on it, but I hadn't known that I was going to make a whole Satie album until pretty much the last minute. Then I made it about him as well as his music and picked some songs that felt to me that he might have loved.

AAJ: Satie's music is unique in that it sounds deceptively simple but there are layers you discover trying to adapt to another instrument, such as the guitar.

TS: I agree. People think of him as, oh, he's just everywhere. And it's just simple. He was terribly young, in his early twenties when he wrote the Gymnopedies and the Gnossiennes. But it's only when you actually look at it and start to, in my case, write lyrics to it, you think, my goodness, he's just changed key very subtly. It's beautiful and so evocative. You can hear his whole life in the music.

There were a lot of things happening during the making of the album. My mom became very ill. She was diagnosed with a gigantic thoracic heart aneurysm, which is having the Sword of Damocles hanging over you. You could just could burst at any time, although she felt pretty much okay until probably the last six months. I also had a very dear friend who was my adopted uncle, who was a huge fan of my music. He died and I thank God the police were sent to his house to break down the door. So, I was able to spend his last four days on earth with him. And I was thinking about past relationships that had not been good. And another dear friend of mine died, who also was a big fan of my music. She was the singer and saxophonist, Sheila Cooper. She was diagnosed with cancer and was one of those people who wouldn't have the treatments. She was dealing with it with diets and all that kind of stuff. When she finally realized she wasn't going to make it, we talked a lot about what that might be like on the other side.

Of course, I'm not a kid anymore, so I do feel mortal as friends around my age and not that much older die off. And I was thinking about life and death and the important things in life. Love my husband. The happiest song on the album, I guess is "Holding Onto Beauty (Gnossienne #3)," which is a tribute to him, but also my birth father who had Alzheimer's. It's also about memory and keeping a hold, wanting to make sure he knows forever. Here's the proof forevermore of how I feel about you even if one day, I don't remember your name or whatever. I wrote "Rayga's (Gymnopedie No. 1" for the bassist. Yasushi had a baby in a snowstorm, and I felt like it was such a miracle and was so excited for him because he was going to be a dad and one day he was going to play outdoors and be making snowballs. Then he had another son and I said, oh, I need to write another one for him. So, I started to write "Gymnopedie No. 3," and it spontaneously turned into a song about my uncle Ken being reborn and coming back as a son and having a wonderful blessed life. It's about reincarnation, love, death, what might be there for us, is there God. Everything.

AAJ: Satie's music is melancholy and wistful. You say you picked it among three choices. What were the other two options?

TS: I'm afraid the others are a secret.

AAJ: Curiosity prompted me to look at your discography to find out if you had recorded a standards album. On Nights of Key Largo it appears you did but with some less than well-known song choices.

TS: I think it's pretty much all standards, isn't it? They're not like common standards, but it does have "Moon and Sand," "Moondance" and "The Look of Love." I do think standards are beautiful, and I do them live. I used to think that there's plenty of standards out there. It maybe doesn't seem needed, don't need my penny's worth, maybe. I always have a little twist on the arrangement.

AAJ: Have you ever considered doing a singer-songwriter sort of album? Maybe like Joni Mitchell, who marries her folk music with jazz chording.

TS: I did when I was young, 18 and playing the guitar, I wrote a lot of songs. They were a bit Joni Mitchell-ish in a young way. I feel quite loose with my tastes. A lot of people start off being jazz and then sort of veer off into r & b because that's who they are. That's their history. That's where they grew up. That's what they listened to. But it just isn't where I feel like going towards. I just love the freedom of jazz.

AAJ: It sounds like you do everything very well: writing, singing, parenting, etc. Is there anything you wish you could do better?

TS: Directions. Driving. My husband won't let me anywhere near the car. Cooking, too. One of my stepmothers was an amazing artist and fabulous cook. She just put her art in everything. And I had a huge crush on her when I was about 12 and wanted to be just like her. But sad to say, I never managed to get the cooking thing down.

AAJ: Who makes dinner then when you are at home?

TS: I'm pretty slapdash about dinner. I just make things that are easy. And my husband, he's always putting olive oil all over everything. And I'm always trying not to. Somebody needs to make a brand called, "It's Only Olive Oil" because that's what he would use all the time. So, his cooking is a little more laden with cholesterol than I would like.

AAJ: So, you watch what you eat, but what junk food do you find impossible to avoid?

TS: Well, sugar is a real problem, but I'm not diabetic though my sugar levels are too high. I lost a lot of weight because I had to stop sugar. And then I had high cholesterol. I had to try and cut out the cholesterol. But I absolutely, if I was allowed to eat, would eat things like bread-and-butter pudding, which is this delicious pudding made with white bread and raisins and lots of sugar and custard, and sponge pudding and custard and mashed potatoes. And I'm a vegetarian, well, do eat fish, but I would have sausage, bangers and mash and beans, and that's the kind of food I grew up eating because my mom was also a horrible cook. I'm a bad cook, but she was really bad. Our foods when we were growing up was chips, beef, hot toast.

AAJ: What do you imagine listeners will think of your Satie record or what do you hope they would take from it?

TS: I hope that they can channel feelings that they have that might need channeling. I've definitely found that it's very cathartic for me to write and sing. But I've also found other people's music to be incredibly helpful. So, I would love to think that people would enjoy the songs just for fun or, you know what? I learned over the years not think of specific things. I've learned to let the song sing me in a funny sort of way so that whatever the song is, whether I've written it or somebody else has written it, I have these squiggly feelings. There's a whole lot of squiggly stuff in here. And that's what I'm singing with at my best. I'm not thinking about my sound or what the story is, I'm just thinking my squiggly bit is listening.

AAJ: I don't believe I'll be able to listen to your music without wondering about what a squiggly feeling is like.

TS: Sorry. I had a very dear friend many years ago, and we used to work together in a boring job, editing reports and proposals. There were about five or six of us, and we would come up with ideas, things to do. One day my idea was that we should all draw our souls. What do we think souls look like? So, I drew the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which is on the cover of the Rolls Royce. Somebody else did sort of this misty, cloudy thing, and my best friend in that department just took a pen and made squiggles. So, it's partly that. And also, when I was a child, my brother and I were terrified by watching Dr. Who on the telly and Dr. Who and the Daleks, which was on in the '60s.

The Daleks are these robots, which are sort of dome-shaped, mutants with these little wheels and they would walk around and go, "exterminate, exterminate." They were just pure evil, which is also the opposite in fact of what I'm about to say. One episode I saw that the inside of one was black, gooey treacle, and that's why they had this hard exoskeleton of steel. So, I think of the soul as that, like the squishy inside of us, which might be good. I think about all this stuff all the time.

AAJ: A soft center. Sounds like a candy bar.

TS: Exactly. My other favorite addiction—marshmallows, chocolate-covered.

AAJ: Who would imagine the things that go on in our minds and how that effects who we become?

TS: I think so, too, and I think about how a lot of people just assumed I was on the scrap heap, a pregnant, 15-year-old, then a single mom, but here I am, so there you have it.

Comments