Words by Emma Warren

For decades Jhelisa Anderson has been better known as a phenomenal vocalist than as a composer, but that’s not the whole story. Her new release 7 Keys Vol 1 & 2 is a suite of soundscapes composed and harmonically designed for meditation in the lineage of Alice Coltrane and Pauline Oliveras. It just gained four stars in Mojo and a rave review in The Wire – which compared her to the increasingly iconic Angel Bat Dawid, who back in 2018 composed an opera for the biblical Song of Solomon.

It’s common for women making music to be shoehorned into the role of vocalist, doubly so for women of colour regardless of whether or not they write their own music. In reality, Jhelisa has been composing music ever since the late 1990s when she released her critically-acclaimed debut ‘Galactica Rush’, which she wrote and co-produced. The single ‘Friendly Pressure’ remains a fan-favourite with over three million streams on Spotify. One of her compositions on the follow-up record ‘Language Electric’ involved a string quartet and she realised her vision with violinist Everton Nelson (who went on to lead movie soundtrack recordings for film composers including Three Billboards Outside Ebbing and Danny Elfman’s Alice Through The Looking Glass).

“It was uncommon back then for soul or jazz singers to write instrumentals,” says the Atlanta-based vocalist and songwriter, whose film and TV credits includes Words Like Daggers with The Angel (2020), Hawthorne (2009), and The Leech and the Earthworm (2003). “That was me trying to draw attention to my compositional skills. If you’re a classical musician you can use the word,” she says, “and I only got comfortable with the role of a composer about five years ago.” 

Given that the phrase ‘classical music’ contains the word ‘class’ it doesn’t take much to see it as more of a demographic than a genre. Jhelisa laughs: “It was just old Italian musicians, doing their thing. But it has to be marketed – as classical.” Her approach is different. “It’s frequency design,” she says. “That is what I do. From childhood, I knew which notes sounded good, which chords felt interesting. Now I know that harmonic design creates a certain field, a certain feeling. It can make you jump up and dance, be happy, be sad. It changes your atmosphere, transporting you to another place, altering your whole bio-system… I’m getting away from the traditional idea of what composition is for.”

‘7 Keys’ is released on the respected UK independent Dorado Records, who released her albums back in the 1990s. It is based around single notes that she sustained and recorded in her home studio and then stacked on top of each other to create new and unexpected subharmonics. Later, in the studio, she brought together a group of select musicians to add to the tones. 

She prefers the TLM103 (‘the baby Neumann’) to record her voice because it brings out the deep warmth in her vocals, something that was especially important for this project where she eschewed the powerful acrobatics she’s capable of and instead generated virtuosic long tones. “I need to feel close to the mic. I’m usually pressing up against the screen. There are sound considerations because when I record from home. It’s not fully soundproofed so I have to make sure the birds are not singing, I have to make sure the neighbours are not deciding to mow the lawn because the mic picks up everything.” That said, they left a bit of birdsong into the ‘7 Keys’ recordings ‘because that was kind of cool for the atmosphere’. 

She’d hold each note for as long as possible, whether that was thirty seconds or a minute. “It would be different per what key it was,” she says. “C is coming out from a slightly different place from D or E. As I moved through the keys, I realised I get on a bit better with E than I do with B… It gave me the opportunity to focus: not just ‘is the note correct’ or ‘is my posture correct’, but to focus on something from deep inside. I wanted a love intention, an exploratory intention. I was focused on what I wanted this note to contain in terms of my thoughts since there were no lyrics. I wanted to send out little tentacles, information from my DNA.”

Jhelisa’s own life story runs like a film. She grew up singing in Baptist churches across the American south with her vocalist mother, gospel radio show host father as part of the Little David Family. After graduating from high school in the early 1980s she moved to LA where she got a job on reception at Motown – from which she was fired when they discovered she was a singer. Soon after she met Jeff Buckley, who played guitar in her band and recorded on her early demos, and who wrote ‘I love you Jhelisa A’ on the sleeve notes to ‘Grace’. 

She moved to London in the 1990s, recording as a member of Soul Family Sensation and singing backing vocals on Björk’s ‘Debut’ before releasing her own critically-acclaimed albums. Her recordings preceded more widely-acclaimed debuts by D’Angelo and Maxwell; Chaka Khan flew Jhelisa to LA to record the track Death of a Soul Diva; she opened for James Brown, Herbie Hancock and Roy Ayers; and she once drove Nina Simone to hospital after the legendary singer had twisted her knee. It’s fair to say that she’s been a few places, and seen a few things. 

Composing is an intuitive process for her. “There is no premeditated preparation,” she says. “It’s like going to a ceremony. I’m going into a womb. I’m going into the right atmosphere to open myself up and put myself amongst the notes, the frequencies, the harmonic designs. I start from the piano and usually, I start from the bass. The baseline will inform the variants. It becomes a playing field.”

She’s going deep into ideas of what notes actually are. “I’ve been working with notes since I was a kid,” she says, “and I didn’t think anything of it. They were like toys, playthings. [Now] I approach the keys like ‘what have you got?’… I’m excited about ‘7 Keys’ opening up this idea – what is frequency? What is a note? They call it C, they say it’s 256 Hz, but those are just words to describe a thing. A tree didn’t name itself a tree.” Aretha Franklin’s tone, she adds, 'has millions of years of data in it’ whilst Thom Yorke from Radiohead has an ‘ancient’ voice. “All of our great legendary singers are bringing information forward.

Her unique perspective on voice and composition doesn’t end with deep dives into DNA, ancestry and harmonics. “I joked with my guitarist, you make a living with a piece of wood and strings, don’t ya?,” she says. “We started making a thing of it. We’d start the sessions by recognising the rosewood tree the guitar was made from. The iron ore that makes the piano frame. Every element that makes these instruments deserves respect.”

Instruments deserve respect, and so do composers – especially those who can sing.