On International Women’s Day 8 March 2024, British soul, jazz and R&B singer Sarah Jane Morris launched her new album The Sisterhood.
It is her tribute to ten iconic women singers and songwriters, who have had a massive influence on the development of the popular song. This is Morris’s lock-down project. She and her husband artist Mark Pulsford spent the months of isolation studying the lives of pioneering singers and musicians, women whose music is world famous, but whose stories are less well known. Together Morris and Pulsford then wrote a series of song lyrics, each an illuminating, sometimes shocking tale from the lives of these remarkable women.
Morris then got together with her long time co-writer/co-producer/guitarist Tony Rémy to write the music. Each song would be absolutely contemporary, it would also reflect the styles, forms and influences of the artists depicted. The ten women chosen are: Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, Annie Lennox and Kate Bush – representing a wide mixture of styles of popular music.
To honour the legacies of these stars, whilst creating new work demands a breadth of experience of different popular musical forms as well as great versatility in performance styles. Clearly Morris and Rmy have the necessary skills.
The Sisterhood is a musical tour de force. Right from the funky opening bars of the Aretha Franklin tribute Sisterhood, with its rousing refrain “We lock arms in sisterhood”, the wall of sound arrangement, and beautiful Jason Rebello piano solo, you know you are in for a musical ride. Bessie Smith gets a potted biography, Couldn’t Be Without, and a lovely horn arrangement courtesy of Byron Wallen. I was impressed by the way Rémy comfortably inhabits the wild man rock guitar of Big Brother and the Holding Company on the Janis Joplin inspired Tomorrow Never Happens. Morris, who once, inexplicably, was passed over by Hollywood to play Joplin in a biopic, a role for which she would have been perfect, is right at home in that rock genre.
The hit single of the album for me would be the Nina Simone homage So Much Love, for which Rémy has written a soul ballad with a smooth groove and Sally Herbert, former fellow-Communard violinist turned orchestral arranger, has provided a lush string arrangement – it’s a lovely tune which deserves airplay.
Most of the lives of the women featured are extraordinary. Morris says of On the Jazz Side of the Road, the song she wrote for Rickie Lee Jones: “Her grandfather was a one-legged tap dancer in vaudeville. You couldn’t make that up. She went out for a year with Tom Waits. Dr John got her hooked on heroin. She was influenced by Van Morrison and she was hitching her way round America aged 12. It’s all in this song….”
Then comes a complete change, Rimbaud of Suburbia, Morris’s homage to Kate Bush whom she links to Rimbaud – both started their creative lives as young teenagers. There are guest appearances from Orphy Robinson on vibes, David Coulter on jaws harp, some appropriately electronic drums from Martyn Barker (echoes of Peter Gabriel in there somehow) and a dreamy pop string arrangement from Italian cellist Enrico Melozzi, with whom Morris has played over many years.
I am on more familiar territory with the next track, a homage to one of my favourites, Joni Mitchell. Nice details in this one – something of a Tom Scott period feel, Patrick Clahar has a lovely solo, another set of strings from Melozzi, and the repeated line “Joni of starlight”.
And so the variety continues with, in my opinion the other hit single of the piece, the Billie Holiday tribute Junk in my Trunk. It’s a gentle jazz/hip hop number underpinned by drummer Westley Joseph, with a plethora of guitars and some gorgeous brass from Quentin Collins.
A classy piece dedicated to Annie Lennox For the Voiceless celebrates both her music, and her work for human rights charities, before the tribute to Miriam Makeba brings the album (and the live show too) to a rousing close, with the huge sound of the Soweto Gospel Choir, Morris’s voice weaving in and out, above and below.
Morris and Rémy play with their usual bandmates – Henry Thomas on bass guitar, Tim Cansfield on guitar, and new member Jason Rebello on piano and keyboards. The band is augmented by many starry friends and colleagues and there are guest appearances from Courtney Pine and Dominic Miller too, arrangements from The Chaps, with sterling work from backing singers Gina Foster and Beverley Skeete.
Rémy’s guitar runs through the album, though so chameleon-like is his playing that you may need to check the sleeve notes, as I did to see who was playing which guitar bits on Miss Makeba (answer Tony Rémy – all guitars). His range is astonishing, playing every kind of guitar, including bass, but also keyboards, and even occasionally drums and drum programming.
What ties this varied collection of songs together is Morris’s magnificent voice. As John Fordham writes in the liner notes, on first hearing Morris in the 1980s: “Sarah Jane’s sound caught the raw majesty of legends like Janis Joplin and Nina Simone, and her octave-vaulting contralto range stretched from sonorous reverberating low tones to a searingly soulful falsetto.”
These new songs act as a showcase for the breadth and versatility of that unique voice. Morris is also a compelling live performer.
Track Listing – all songs by Morris/Rémy/Pulsford
Sisterhood (Aretha Franklin)
Couldn’t Be Without (Bessie Smith)
Tomorrow Never Happens (Janis Joplin)
So Much Love (Nina Simone)
Jazz Side of the Road (Rickie Lee Jones)
Rimbaud of Suburbia (Kate Bush)
Sing Me a Picture (Joni Mitchell)
Junk in My Trunk (Billie Holiday)
For the Voiceless (Annie Lennox)
Miss Makeba (Miriam Makeba)
