INTERVIEW : JAH9
Interview & pictures : Sébastien Jobart
on Friday, April 03rd 2015 - 9 881 views
Dub poetry was missing a poetess. With Jah9, it has found a singular personality. After her studies and the start of a career in the Jamaican business world, Jah9 began her artistic journey with a firm determination to leave the beaten track. She calls her music Jazz On Dub, a spiritual, militant and melodically unorthodox music.
If her first album, "New Name", produced by Rory (Stone Love), revealed her roots side, she promises new discoveries with her upcoming projects. An interview in which we talk about jazz, dub, poetry, her album "Rebellion", in the pipeline for six years, but also about yoga, Beres Hammond, Don Corleon and the sound of St Croix.
Reggaefrance / This is your first tour as Jah9, are you pleased with the greetings?
Jah9 / Definitely very pleased. I am always surprised at how much the French people know of the music. I get a lot of support from France. Everyone I meet tells me: « I have been listening to your music since 2012 » or sometimes 2009! That is very encouraging.
Your father was a preacher, I guess you started singing in church?
That’s true. And my mother would sing and my sister too. There was a lot of singing in my house as well as in the church. As I grew older, I sang with in my school choir, church choir, regional choirs, I travelled with my choir, I was a soloist in my choir… Singing was always something dominant in my everyday life even though I did’nt study music academically.
What kind of child were you? Did you read or write a lot?
I was reading very early and I started writing very early. I have memories of seeing my handwriting, as a child writing short poems almost like limericks. I have volumes of books over the years, penning my thoughts. But music and poetry were always two separate things: I never wrote to music. It was much later in my life, when I finishing up high school, when I started to play with writing songs. I really got into writing songs when I met roots music, like instrumental dub. The open spaces that dub provides really inspired the sound out of me.
 Définir sa musique comme jazz revient à dire qu’on va sortir des sentiers battus. 
Jazz is a strong influence on the album, is it a genre you grew up listening to?
Jazz is similar to what dub represents to me. It is a departure from the traditional way of using music. It is flexible. To define your music as jazz is really to say that you are going outside of the box. That’s kind of how I approach it as well. The women and the music of jazz that inspired me, the trumpeters and the vocalists, they encourage me to do something different with my voice than what I was taught to do in my choir. That really inspired me. When I found my own voice and I started to write songs, the melody that I would compose would be very unorthodox. And so jazz is the genre where they fell into. But it was dub that I was doing and it wasn’t the classical jazz instrumenters. That is why I coined the term « Jazz on dub », because dub is what really pull that peculiar style of music out of me.
Dub enables all kind of music to infuse…
Yes because dub is a treatment, moreso than a genre in itself. You can dub reggae, which is where it started, but you can dub any music. It is a postproduction thing, so after the musicians have done their work, an engineer can dub even classical music. You don’t find people experimenting with that but it is something I want to experiment with: dubbing all different genres. What I love about roots music is the heavy drum and bass, which is something that African people have really brought to the world, the idea of pounding hard beats, and the bassline. That is something that would always be present regardless of where I experiment, we always try to find a way to inject that in.
The album I did with Rory (Stone Love) and a lot of the songs released right now are more roots heavy, but the music that I started out with, was very much more jazz. So I started out of jazz bars, in Kingston, singing covers of Billie Holliday and Nina Simone, and turning songs from Sizzla or I-Wayne into jazz renditions. Then I started to put my own music to roots music and I would still have jazz inflexions, because it just came up naturally to what my voice wanted to do. But the music that is coming, like the “Rebellion” album that has been coming for the past five to seven years now, then you will start to feel the jazz influences. It is much more musical.
This is the album you have been working on with Sheldon Bernard and Beres Hammond?
Yes. Sheldon Bernard is the first person who heard my songs and encourage me. I always knew I had something good but sometimes you please yourself with your heart. It is only until somebody else says to you: ‘This is good’ that you start thinking: ‘Ok, maybe other people wants to hear it too’. It is not that I am not confident but the more I would play and share it and the more the response was overwhelming. So I just surrendered to that.
We also heard you on a riddim by Don Corleon, the track Warning.
Yes! That was the first single that I released. That was going to be on the "Rebellion" album but instead it just became a single. It just went out there. He gave me the first opportunity to share my music with the world.
Will it be on the "Rebellion" album?
It probably will be, but it may not sound the same. We probably will change it a little bit, but it will definitely be on the album, there is a lot of love for that song. That was actually a poem first. That was one of the first songs I experimented with turning my poetry into music. That first verse was the poem. And then I started to hear the refrain, the warning, over and over and that is how the song manifested… The rest is history.
Rory Stone Love produces the album "New Name". How did you link with him?
I met Rory through Gebreselassie, who I would know for the Kingston Dub Club. Before that he had a sound system where he played strictly roots music, rockers, dub. He used to play a lot of Jah Shaka, Augustus Pablo… He was one of the first to give me the opportunity to hear dub played loud. I would spend a lot of time at his home, lean upon the box on the Sunday nights when he would play out… As a poet, sometimes inspiration just comes when there is emotion and dub released that emotion so easily and that is when I started to write my poetry through that music, because it gave me so much space.
And so Gebresselassie, knowing that I was a vocalist, introduced me to Rory because Rory at that time had a lover’s rock riddim that he wanted a female vocalist on. I went to his home studio by myself. He was impressed by the fact that I didn’t come with any fear. I think I met him at the right time in his life as well because he was also searching, on his journey to Rastafari and finding himself, kind of moving on from what he is traditionally known for and moving into more spirit music, trying to connect to that essence. We found a good chemistry, because he knows roots music. One song turns into two songs, turn into "Let’s do an album!"
The message is essential in your music: social and political issues, but above all self-consciousness, and self-empowerment.
That is what it has been for me. My journey with music has been a journey about finding and connecting with my spirit. The music that comes to me when I write that kind of music I find that people connect through that kind of music. There is not a lot of that kind of message in roots music. There is a lot of social, Rastafari as politics and as livity but there isn’t really that connection in that kind of feminine nurturing way where you learn what it is: what is livity? How do you connect the idea with the experience of it? My background, my connection with the language and words because I am a wordsmith made it easier for me to express and I express a lot in my music: there a lot more words than the usual roots music which is very simple. I wasn’t so sure how it would be received but I think there was a place for it because you don’t find so much of it. The music evolved in that way, where I was able to use it to help myself grow. The feedforward I was getting was that this is what was necessary. My journey evolved and I started to practice yoga. I started to learn more about Kamit, to understand more the world and the systems involved, and started to strip away some of the illusions. I retired from corporate Jamaica and shed a lot of the things that I grew up thinking they were important. That made a lot more space for that kind of inspiration. I just surrendered to it and so the music kept coming.
You mentioned yoga, do you practice a lot?
I am a student of yoga. I also teach it, I have been trained to teach Iyengar Yoga. I have also received training and exposure in Yin Yoga and Ashtanga Yoga. The practice that I am most drown to is Kemetic Yoga but I have never been trained in that. I love the story of it because this is the original practice of yoga that was drawn on the temples and this is the practice that moved into India and inspired Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga and all the ones that we are more familiar with now. I practice mostly Ahstanga now. I like the idea of a discipline that has a particular structure. There are hundreds of different asanas. With Ashtanga it is a particular series and I need that structure. I have completely devoted myself to the practice so I need something that I can just go to. I found out a lot of people are like that in the West where we don’t have the time to completely surrender to the practice. The Kemetic yoga offers even more, takes it a step further. The postures are more subtle than Hatha Yoga it is almost like it is electric conduction in your body. You feel the ancient principles and the stories are being told as you do the practice. It is not just your teacher telling you to breathe this way, this is a story that you get to connect and that gives you the courage and the strength to hold the poses.
Kemetic Yoga reminds me most of all that the practice isn’t about stretching and contorting. It is about selfless service, about reading and making yourself aware as well as emptying and surrender… Asana is just a small part of yoga even though in the West we have made asana the biggest part of it. Original yoga man would just sit down and breathe. That is really the essence of it: the breath, which is life, the first element, the first part of being human. We give thanks for yoga, His Imperial Majesty was a practitioner of yoga, as well as Leonard Howell. We see where Rastafari and yoga and Kemet are all married. It is perfect logical sense because it is about livity, not about religion, it is about transcending the physical and connecting on a level that is beyond skin and flesh and bones.
This reminds me of the song Inner Voice where you say: « Seek for your inner voice to help you make your choices / Learn to differentiate between the truth and the noises ». So far, have you always rely on your inner voice?
The journey has been to recognize it and to stay connected with it in such a way that you don’t get misled by it, because sometimes we confuse our thoughts, our mind, our programmings with that inner voice. That voice is not from your brain. That voice is from spirit, from gut, from heart. We are in a culture that glorifies intelligence. We forget that intelligence is secondary to the intelligence of the heart. We have to remember that the sages of Old were not reading books. They were pulling informations from Information from the universe, perfect knowledge, omnipotence, omniscience. This is what meditation reminds us: not to sit and concentrate on our thoughts, but to empty your mind of thoughts. It is frightening for some people.
What can we expect from you in the future?
There are some singles I’ve been working on recently, apart from the New Name album, like Steamers Ah Bubble, Shower of Blessings, Brother, Tension… There is more work coming out of that collaboration with Sainte Croix. Very powerful Rastafari vibration there! I connected with that. They make that raw down tempo heavy dub that I love! There is more to come from that collaboration, and with elders as well. Because that is really where my heart is, the roots of the music. We are working on an EP to release in July, hopefully, potentially something in November as well. Hopefully the "Rebellion" album will be there by the end of this year or the beginning of next year. That is going to be the real taste of Jazz on Dub. And there are more albums to come: I have two albums that are already written. After this set of releases, you will start to hear more of my productions. I want to create from scratch. That is the kind of artist I want to be. I didn’t grew up in the culture of juggling and dancehall. I grew up listening to original scored music, sheet music in choir practice. That is my background, so that is where I want to bring my music forward to.
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