In the Third Generation the Daughters Are Free - front cover

This project is a collective memory collage. It is a personal exposé: an attempt to make sound where there is silence and the shame and guilt it enshrouds. It is also a celebration, a tribute, a comedy and a love story. Mostly it is a conversation between truths, memories and generations, a step towards resolution. I am interested in the spaces that lie between personal and historical, individual and familial, inheritance and invention.

I began with a collection of family recordings, poems, letters, and photographs. My own writings, both textual and musical, are reactions to these primary sources and my familial experiences, impressions, and conversations. My compositions are further interpreted by my bass, my voice, and the improvisational force of what resembles a modern jazz quartet.

I have always known that having a voice, speaking and singing out loud, means power. This is part of my legacy as well.

In the Third Generation the Daughters Are Free - album insert

I come from an artistic family filled with singers, musicians, poets, photographers, dancers, actors. I come from parents who believe in psychotherapy. I come from Brooklyn. I come from jazz, which has its own literal and figurative familial legacy.

Aurora Levins Morales writes, “It takes three generations. If you resolve your relationship with your mother you’ll both change, and your daughter will have it easier, but her daughter will be raised differently. In the third generation the daughters are free.”