We recently reviewed “One Grass Skirt to London,” the recent album release from Malia. We reached out afterward, as we are trying to say hello to more jazz performers!
As background, moving from the southern African republic of Malawi to London at the age of fourteen, the singer spent her teenage years in the Big Smoke, soon setting her sights on a career in music. After finishing school, she worked as a waitress while organizing a band to accompany her, singing ballads and jazz standards in bars and clubs around London. Her singing style flirted with styles from the 1960s and 1970s. As you may hear, her role models include Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Nina Simone. She experienced a breakthrough during a visit to New York City: At a New York café, she heard a pop-jazz track sung in French by vocalist Liane Foly that had been produced by Berklee School of Music graduate Andre Manoukian. Malia was entranced by the enticing mix of pop and jazz sensibilities, and she contacted Manoukian to solicit his help. The pair admired each other’s musical ideas and potential, and they set to work on Malia’s album, “Yellow Daffodils,” released in 2002.
The rest they say is history, and on January 10, Malia released her new album, a reworking of classic songs that we all know and love, giving them a new jazz polish.
Saying hello to Malia, we have been decorating at the office of the magazine the last week, everyone pitching in with a paintbrush (and avoiding wallpaper), but in her video “Everybody’s Talking,” Malia is clearly decorating and enjoying it! Is this Malia telling us she is available for decorating jobs around the home!?
Malia: Leonard Vee & Pamier Hilal, Timo Jäger, came together to make the video happen after I talked about the song and what it means to me. I guess its about leaving and heading off to new pastures in that song… it is about new beginnings and the video reflects that. I do like decorating though; it’s fun.
On the subject of fun, the album cover is a great fun cover. It touches on the passage from Malawi to London. How much of Malawi does Malia take with her now a days?
Malia: My first years were spent there and my mother is Malawian, so I speak the language with her. As long as I am connected to my mom, as I was born of her it will never leave me. I have some relatives in Malawi that I stay in touch with. Malawi is a tiny country and even smaller, as Lake Malawi takes up such a large part (with many unique fish species!). It is a beautiful place.
We read somewhere about Malia talking about the song “When I’m Cleaning Windows” and how it reminded her of her dad. We have noted elsewhere here how songs connect us to people and we always get taken back to certain people and places when we hear a certain song. Music has that ability, so were songs selected as they meant something to Malia for this album?
Malia: Yes, especially that one, because my father and us kids would watch the week-end black/white films on television and George Formby would often appear on those, and the memory of us sitting and watching TV and getting involved in films and those moments with my dad I don’t forget. I recall George Formby, with his voice and that banjo strumming away, it was just a charming moment in time, eating custard cream biscuits, drinking tea and watching those films with him.
To us, Formby was a comic performer—a talented one! Along with Laurel and Hardy, who also sang a few good songs! How do you take these old songs and add something to them, rather than just reproduce the original sound? Malia reconstructs the tracks.
Malia: I love Laurel and Hardy too; we watched them a lot as they frequented the television, making us laugh. As for reinterpreting the songs, well, I have been in the game a while! So I trust that my voice will bring something different to the song as I bring my idea of what the songs mean and also mean to me. I also choose phenomenal musicians who have a distinctive way of playing and so already that difference comes to the table from the start. I love the songs for whatever sentiment they bring and I rely on our chemistry coming together in trust of the process and the power of the song. I don’t overthink them; if I like a song and feel it as though I have written it, it is then often good enough for me. So if the original artist that I heard the song from gave me joy or impacted me in some deeper way, then it is an honor for me to follow in their footsteps and join the party. The album is a kind of homage to them, the songs, the writers of the songs etc. I put trust in my voice, my feelings and the musicians I work with.
On a slightly different angle to things, we note a common love of Nina Simone. When we spoke to our friend Shirley King (BB’s daughter), she remarked that behind her dads music and that of Nina was a love of gospel music; she also noted how Elvis (who she met) was always a gospel performer at heart. How far does Malia follow that line? Was gospel that influential in the development of Nina Simone and her sound?
Malia: I think it is at least partly true as I follow my mentors, the musicians who opened the gates for me to follow a musical career. Some of them begun singing gospel music, spiritual songs—and Nina Simone was definitely one of those people, Billy Holliday another (her album “Lady in Satin” remains one of my prized treasures no matter how many decades go by it remains a standout important record for me). So I guess a part of me resonates with them as they were my mentors; that is their imprint within me. That means that what resonates with them resonates with me. I am influenced by them for a reason: the spirituality and gravitas of the voice, the masterfulness of being able to convey the pain, joy or love all in one song in beauty and grace. I was very attracted to that, and their imprint is still here in me. I learn from them. Personally, I was never brought up in a gospel environment, but I listened voraciously to these musicians and spiritual songs growing up.
We rate Nina Simone massively as one of the greatest vocalists of all time, although originally she wanted to be a concert pianist.
Malia: Correct, watch the movie! She wanted to be the first classical black musician, but she wasn’t allowed. One of her regrets.
We then had a brief chat about the book, Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis, about his travels in life with a piece of Nina Simone’s chewing gum (used).
Malia: She was an incredible woman in terms of power and energy and perseverance and force. So I’m sure the gum was precious!
Moving on to lived experience and its impact on music. Does Malia feel that as she has matured as an artist post “Yellow Daffodils,” released in 2002, has the passage of time changed her perspective on music?
Malia: Definitely because you gain more confidence. There is some merit in the purity of things when you first start out; your desire to sing and connect to music is strong in a different way. The lyrics hold different meanings. As you get older, you understand the lyrics more perhaps with a greater perspective and you have a different relationship with them. Youth and aging both give something different, as equal but different. Of course, the voice lends itself to a more serious approach; it may be a bit more fragile or deeper, textured, frail, possibly. The voice like the body holds the signs of time and so you have to work it differently. I always wanted to share my stories with the world but nowadays I think harder about what I want to share with people, I dare say even from a motherly perspective, by that I mean nurturing. What I want to sing and write about is more grounded for a universal experience, a reason toconnect with others. At the start, I lacked the confidence to say that I was a singer and worthy of any attention with what I had to say; I was more insecure in those days. Now, I feel myself in a position where what I have to say is of value to myself and therefore hopefully others and I have the confidence to share that. That confidence for me came with maturity.
Paul Stanley of Kiss points out that the voice inevitably changes. He says that when people complain to him that he doesn’t sound now as he did in the 70’s or 80’s, he will tell them to play an album from that time; he can’t reproduce that sound now in his seventies. So he says you refine your voice accordingly.
Malia: Age is inevitable! We get older and as we age, we gain more experience. Things like joy and pain possibly carry more weight in our musicianship. The voice is a living thing and I am not the same as I was at 25. It is how you live your life and what happens to you that shapes the voice too. The soul is always there; that is the GPS to pull you forward. But take care of your voice; some people age quicker than others and the same with voices. If you listen to Shirley Bassey; her voice is still pristine, I sense she took great care of it or her genes did. My God she is incredible! her voice is a living thing.
To us at the magazine, we always associate jazz with those little jazz cellars, those smokey little cellars of the Harding era in the early 1920’s America. The image of the female performer there in the club doing a jazz number in the prohibition era, etc. Even JK Rowling plays with that idea with the Jazz Club in “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” called The Blind Pig, a magical speakeasy in New York during the 1920s. The club is a dark, seedy place that offers jazz, dancing, food, and drink, and Musician Emmi voices a goblin jazz singer who performs at The Blind Pig… Jazz isn’t that today (although we kind of wish it was!). How does Malia see the jazz scene in 2025?
Malia: I would start by saying that jazz is a label impressed on certain types of singers,musicians, perhaps those that don’t fit into the pop world, I joke! But not entirely untrue. To me it is all music and those singers I was brought up on—Nat King Cole and so forth —were all singing classical songs that felt timeless to me. There are so many ideas of what jazz is; to me it is a freedom and I have maintained it to the sense that I go into music in an improvised way, knowing how to converse with other musicians in a live setting where we will often tweak the music as we go along. We enjoy the experience, it is those great musicians I have mentioned before that I gravitate toward.
Absolutely, look at Bix Beiderbecke; he was all about experience and improvisation.
Malia: To sell records, we classify and there was an influence there in the classical musicians who were called jazz singers, but to me it is just music; I don’t have those borders. It is just what I fell into and I enjoy that kind of musicianship and singing.
A quick finishing question: what lies ahead in 2025?
Malia: Hopefully, we are coming back from that awful Covid period when work was lost. We are finding our way back up again and I hope to be doing some concerts toward the end of the year into the beginning of 2026. I am always thinking of ideas for the following album; that is always the case with me. I would love to do a dance album! For now I am gathering ideas, wondering who to write with and so forth. I’m experimenting again. I also have a new agent and I will be playing a couple of shows in Germany in April.
And I hope you liked the feature, dear reader! If you did, please check out the other pages of the magazine; we have many great features, merchandise, editorials and even poetry! We work hard for you, and if you want to show some appreciation and support what we do, then do use the Support Us link below and buy me a drink for New Years Eve! Always appreciated.
By Mark C. Chambers
and
Lorraine Foley
