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 via San Francisco in 1997, Souter won a scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music in 1999 but left after one semester to study privately with Mark Murphy, who mentored her for four years in return for booking his workshops, and who remained a lifelong friend. "As a full-time features journalist for the international press, it was very hard to fit in school around tight newsprint deadlines." 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), 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.

In June of 2025, she released Shadows and Silence: The Erik Satie Project  (Noanara, 2025), which has elevated Souter's musical storytelling to another level. "I am a parent, a wife, a sibling, a daughter, and these are where I find my deepest moments of connection. But music is a part of that bigger whole, of course. It is also my solace. I had a gig at a performing arts center in Virginia the day I found out my mother had died. Of course, I had to continue, rather than let down the audience and the band. But for those two sets it was as if it hadn't happened. I was surprised and not surprised by that. Actually, much of this album is solace because my mother died during the making of it, along with several very dear friends of mine." 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. "I wrote it for my husband because, as my adopted father started having memory issues, and thinking of my birth father's Alzheimer's, I thought how terrible for those left behind to be forgotten by someone who once loved you so much. So, if I ever lose my memory, he'll have that as a sort of message from me."

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. I thought he was my real father until I was about 11 or 12, and then my parents got divorced. One day when she was cross with him, she told me that he wasn't my father. She told me that my birth father was Spanish and had died before I was born. It explained why I had a tan (which I was teased a lot for at school) while my brother was blond. And she had told me his name which, in retrospect, doesn't sound very Spanish, and one day idly perusing the London telephone book I came across it. He'd added his mother's maiden name to Kelly, otherwise I would never have found him. He was the only one in the book.

AAJ: Was your heritage an inspiration for your album Pictures in Black and White (Noa Records, 2018)?

TS: That's right. Once I got to America where, I feel, the fallout from slavery is more apparent and in your face, I started to really delve into the history, reading slave memoirs and history. It all went into this album, where I took known songs and interpreted them from the perspective of black history. So "Lonely Woman," instead of being about a jilted woman, I reinterpreted as the story of two slaves who were forcibly separated, and "A Taste of Honey" I interpreted as imagined being sung by the story of a woman who came home from working during the day in the fields and discovered her husband had been kidnapped from Africa. The album has an arc, starting with an African song.

AAJ: How did "Reynardine" 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 I am bi-racial, that was fair enough. I've been singing that song since I was 14. It's 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, and the address might be "it's opposite the Shell station."

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 escaped being named Bathsheba, the heroine from Far From the Madding Crowd, which she read when I was six weeks old.

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: I had been playing regularly with Dana since 2003. He is super talented and very sympatico and we'd done many duo gigs together. So that was just an obvious continuation of our musical relationship.

AAJ: Yotam Silberstein does amazing work on guitar.

TS: Yes, and you can really hear his love of Brazilian music in his playing. That was a great band: Yasushi Nakamura, who is also on my Erik Satie album, Keita Ogawa on percussion, Billy Drummond on drums and Adam Platt on piano.

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." 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. But I think my first real music crushes were Sandy Denny from Fairport Convention and Jacqui McShee from Pentangle—both, I now realize, jazz influenced bands.

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

TS: My home life was difficult at that time. So I fell under the influence of a much older man and ran away from home four months before my 16th birthday.

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. A friend of mine who I'd worked with as an editor, invited me to come and visit him in San Francisco. And then another friend, this incredible photojournalist called Stefan Lorant, who I had interviewed for a magazine called The Sunday Correspondent when he won a Lifetime Achievement Award for Photojournalism at the age of 96, also suggested I visit him in Lenox, Mass. He was quite the character. He had lived in Berlin and been imprisoned by Hitler and was friends with people like Marlene Dietrich. He took me to see a local production of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht, who had been a friend of his, but we left during the intermission because it wasn't good and, when we came home, he put the record on and stood there with a baton and conducted it.

AAJ: So you remained in the States?

TS: I spent a week with Stefon, 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 MSM for a semester. I met Mark when he came to do a workshop and I had interviewed him for a school paper. A few weeks later a friend asked if I wanted to attend one of his workshops, which I did, and when she subsequently left, Mark asked her to ask me to take over. I did it for four years. 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 less of a perfectionist. Perfectionism is 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'd always sung, but I came to jazz late via Wayne Shorter's Native Dancer album featuring Milton Nascimento when I was in my early thirties. I just loved singing along, not imagining that I would ever do it as a career, But whenever I did sing, people would ask where they could come hear me sing. One night I was at this karaoke bar and there was somebody there, a musicologist, who became a very good friend of mine, and we started going out every Sunday to hear music, and he would bully me every week to sit in. I was way too scared at first but eventually I started to sing at open mics. One night, I was at a bar in New York called Judy's and the house pianist David Lahm heard me sing "Round Midnight" and came up to me afterwards 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 got a gig at the 55 Bar, which was this amazing iconic dive bar for jazz in the Village run by this woman called Queva Lutz. Basically, I had that gig every month for 17 years. 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'd already recorded a four-song EP with a pianist called Mark Berman in 2000 to get gigs with. Then I went back into the studio in 2002 and recorded some more and put it out two years later.

AAJ: The next one—Nights of Key Largo on the Japanese audiophile label Venus—came out in 2008.

TS: 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. I'd let my journalism income lapse to focus on music, which isn't exactly well paid, so being approached by Venus was a godsend.

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. The following year I got signed to Motéma, who put out Obsession. And then in 2011, 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. and had come across his beautiful jazz version of Chopin's "Prelude in E minor." I had mentioned it in passing when I was ordering more CDs from Mr. Hara, and 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 and record with Steve Kuhn? They added Joe Locke, Gary Versace and Joel Frahm, who was on the previous album, along with Steve, David Finck and Billy Drummond. We did three standards—"Baubles, Bangles and Beads," "My Reverie" and "The Lamp is Low," which had been taken from the classical canon and then 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 "Gnossienne No. 1" by Anne Ducros, probably 20 years ago. Then, during the pandemic, I picked the Erik Satie project out of three ideas I had at the time. I think the ephemeral nature of his music lent itself to what was going on in my life at the time. Once I had picked it as an idea, I started really listening and investigating, reading probably 10 books about Satie and going 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.

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. 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 like having the Sword of Damocles hanging over you which could drop at any time. I also lost a very dear friend who was my adopted uncle, who was a huge fan of my music. And another dear friend of mine, the singer and saxophonist Sheila Cooper, died after a long struggle with cancer. 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. And I was thinking about life and death and love and reincarnation and whether there is a God. Life stuff. The happiest song on the album, I guess is "Holding Onto Beauty (Gnossienne #3)," which is a tribute to my husband, 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, whose baby was born in a snowstorm. Then he had another son and I started to write "Gymnopedie No. 3," for him, but it spontaneously turned into a song about my uncle Ken being reborn 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 see another standards album in my future.

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 a teen and playing the guitar, I wrote a lot of songs. They were a bit Joni Mitchell-ish in a young way. Nowadays, 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. I'm happy where I am. 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. 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 calories 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. If I was allowed to eat anything I wanted, I 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. Comfort food.

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 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 in processing emotions that are difficult to name. 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. Years ago, at an old job where we had too much time on our hands, I suggested that the editing team each draw what we think a soul looks like. I drew the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the statue on the bonnet 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. To me that was the perfect representation of all the wordless feelings we have inside, and it's that part that I like to sing from.

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 also about how a lot of people, back when I was a pregnant 15-year-old, then a single mom at 18, just assumed I was on the scrap heap. But here I am.

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