This week’s Music Monday on GBH’s All Things Considered featured a visionary artist whose talent and curiosity surfaced at an early age.
Zahili Zamora is a Cuban-born jazz pianist, vocalist, composer, band leader, arranger and educator. She’s traveled from Cuba to Canada, China to Boston — all to perfect her sound. In her new album “Overcoming”, she explores her true self, taking us on her powerful and personal journey.
Zamora joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath in-studio to talk about her evolution and her new album. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I love this record so much, but before we talk about the journey, I want to hear about your beginnings because I’m so curious — in Cuba, around the time when you were growing up, what was your [music] diet? What were you listening to around the house or with your friends?
Zahili Zamora: That’s one of my favorite questions to answer, because my grandfather — my mom’s dad — was a musician. He was a singer in a big band, and although I never got to see him perform live, I was used to seeing him sing a cappella with my uncles and aunties when they went to the conservatory to learn music.
I became curious at a very early age. I don’t even remember, but these are the stories that my grandma told me. At three years old, I started reaching up to the piano, I was playing with the pedals, I was learning music by ear, and she was the one who saw that curiosity and took me to a music school at the age of six.
Rath: What was that music school like?
Zamora: Just a regular music school. You know, the good thing about Cuba, first of all, is that education is free. I had two schools — the regular school, and then, in another schedule, I had the conservatory, which was just the foundation on solfège, how to read music, the very first steps with piano, eventually going into competitions and festivals, and the journey went on.
Rath: You mentioned how, you know, it’s communists, but they’re good on music education. And I know one thing where they kind of put their money where their mouth was was in terms of equality, right? Because they pushed for women’s equality. Was that how you ended up in an all-female band?
Zamora: Yeah. The whole subject of women in the music industry is one that I had to inform myself on, because every time I compare it to Cuba, I think about so many female bands in Cuba — strong, strong-playing [bands].
Rath: That’s amazing. So, what we hear about all the issues with women in music and women in jazz — it’s not that way in Cuba?
Zamora: Well, women in jazz will be a different conversation. That would be a completely different conversation because what I’m telling you about is a salsa band, Timba — music to make people dance, and in the midst of being a very strong, musically talented all-female band, it was also a show.
When we talk about jazz, there’s still a lot of work to be done. There are two or three of us internationally representing — and my number might not be fully accurate, but we still need to keep pushing.
Rath: How old were you when you left Cuba for the first time?
Zamora: I was 22, so it’s been 22 years, almost 23 years.
Rath: Did you have that idea at that point that you wanted to study music in more detail outside of Cuba? What got you to Berklee, here in Boston?
Zamora: Not at all. When I left, the band that I was performing with [was called] Detalle. I owe so much to Detalle — I say it all the time because those were my first steps into how to perform.
But also, my formation in Cuban popular music was, up to that point, just doing classical piano. But I was touring with this band every year. We probably had one or two tours a year.
In one of the many tours, things kept happening — we got more deals, we got more concerts, more festivals. It felt good, and the entire band stayed in Canada.
Obviously, as life goes on, years pass by, and priorities change for the members of the band, and the band split up maybe six years later.
Soon after that, I got the proposal to go and perform in Southeast Asia for only three months. These three months became another six years in Southeast Asia with different bands, but it was a great opportunity to introduce me to what I like to [call] American music.
My first introduction to Motown, the classics of R&B, and anything that was [playing] on the radio at the time [was] more exposure to performance skills as well.
It was during my time in Asia, when we were performing the first set — that was a jazz set — and I started to gravitate towards that set. That was my favorite one, and I started to feel like I wanted more, and I wanted to learn more.
Some of the musicians that I was performing with at the time were Berklee graduates, and they heard me say that I was trying to find a way to go to college because I had literally graduated high school and performed professionally for 15 years.
I was feeling that need now to go to college and dive into jazz. One of my friends [who] graduated from Berklee said, “You should apply to Berklee College of Music.” That’s really what brought me to Boston — and here I am. It’s been, now, 12 years.
Rath: I want to talk about his album, and I want to talk about it especially as an album because the liner notes to it is basically a book — a beautiful, illustrated book that tells the story of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. But this caterpillar has got to learn to swing first before she flies.
Zamora: Yes, yes. You know, the journey of being a musician — I would say the journey of being an artist in general — is all about getting to know yourself as a human being, and what your path, what your mission is on earth, right?
I feel that, as a musician, music is my venue to express a way of connecting with my crowd — a way of making community out of the audience, a way of making somebody cry, a way of making somebody laugh, a way of changing somebody’s life.
Ever since I got to Boston, the first thing that I came in contact with was myself, which I wasn’t planning on. I just wanted to learn more jazz and get my education, but in the midst of it, I realized how much music [is] in us individually as artists. This album is the entire discovery of my personality, my challenges in general, my doubts as a musician, as a human being — all of it together.
It’s taken some courage, to say the least; but I think it’s the right time to be exposed, be vulnerable and share a story that, it turns out, connects with a lot more people than I thought.
Rath: How are we hearing that, musically, on the record?
Zamora: In the record, you hear sounds that are, to me, healing sounds. In the records, you hear me being a rebel, getting tired of carrying a challenge that I no longer want to hold. In the recording, you’ll hear tears, you’ll hear sadness, you will hear realizations, you’ll hear blissful discoveries — you know, you name it.
And just to make it clear: It’s a record based on music performance anxiety, because in my whole journey as a musician and as a composer, I realized that that was something that I needed to discover. I needed to come face-to-face with it.
It’s an interesting realization to have, for lack of better words, when music is your passion and your career, right? Every single tune in this album is based on a specific stage, as I was discovering it, that I needed to deal with some form of performance anxiety.
Rath: I love that, almost, in a way, because it’s hard for me to imagine someone like you having that kind of anxiety.
Zamora: And you know, what I discovered during my research — I grabbed a book called “The Psychology of Music Performance Anxiety” by Diana T. Kenney, and the book opens up just like that. Everybody who suffers from music performance anxiety does not seem like a person who suffers from music performance anxiety.
Rath: That’s funny.
Zamora: I think it makes sense. You know, when you’re excelling, when you’re pushing, there’s a lot of weight that you carry with you — the expectations, the wanting to do good. If you raise the bar and want to raise it even more, are you going to meet it the next time? There’s a lot that goes on in there. A lot of noise.
Rath: That sounds kind of familiar, actually. I think I know what you’re talking about. There are some heavyweight musicians on this record, and I’m curious, could they relate to it? Have they had that same experience when you’re talking through the concepts with them?
Zamora: This is a conversation we still need to have, to be honest.
I called them for various reasons. Some because I connected [with them] — for instance, Sean Jones. I have been listening to his records for years, and the idea of having him on my record, and that beautiful flugelhorn sound that he gets. I gave him a call, and he said yes, and it felt like a blessing.
Yosvany Terry is actually from Cuba, so there’s a connection there that has to do more with roots and where we come from that connected us. Something very similar [with] Pedrito Martinez as well.
But we still have to have that conversation about whether they have thought about this in some way or form, so I’ll keep you posted. Maybe next time.
Rath: Were you thinking of them as you worked with them and deployed them as musicians in aspects of telling the story, like maybe being characters?
Zamora: Yeah, yeah. First of all, I thought of them as inspiration. You know, I look up to them, so I thought the idea of recording an album with them would be a challenge that I would enjoy, that would make me a better musician, and that will make me grow.
There’s a tune, for instance, called “Blissful Sorrow” that is inspired [by] the many conversations I had with my coach, Bridget Keller. In there, I’m featuring Yosvany Terry, and I’m also featuring my voice, so the duality between the sound of the saxophone and my voice is that interaction of conversation.
So yeah — definitely thought of them in some way or form as characters.
Rath: This project grew out of the Global Jazz Project at Berklee, and I should have said this right away, you’ve come full circle now, and you’re teaching at Berklee. Tell us a bit about the Global Jazz Project and how it made this work, or works like it, possible.
Zamora: So, this is the Global Jazz Institute at Berklee College of Music, and it’s directed by Maestro Danilo Pérez. For the master’s program, it’s a one-year program that accepts 20 students worldwide; it’s a free education for the 20 students who come in.
The whole idea is that you dive in and compose and expose yourself and come out of the master’s program with material that is music that’s going to benefit society. It’s music that’s going to be for the betterment of society. That’s the best way I have to put it.
People write about inequality. People write about the environment. People write about their culture. People write about females in the music industry. People write about poetry. In my case, I wanted to be as honest as possible, and I thought it was the best opportunity I had to dive into music performance in society.
So, it’s a year where I’m digging in, I’m researching, I’m relating it to my journey directly, and I’m finding the specific subjects that I can write about, with the help of Danilo Pérez and Patricia Zárate. I mean, I couldn’t have asked for better mentors.
