Melanie Charles - Y'all Don't (Really) Care About Black Women

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2021 release.

With this new Verve project, Y'all Don't (Really) Care About Black Women, Melanie Charles sets out to take this group of songs and breathe new energy into them. Melanie was immediately drawn to the rapturous voices of Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn who inspired her to record arrangements of "God Bless the Child" and "Detour Ahead." This album is a love letter to the unheralded labor of black women. Melanie asks listeners to be accountable to black women as much as they care for their works.

Washington Post:

As with countless other areas of American culture, the contributions of Black women in jazz have been underappreciated for decades. Just look at Betty Carter as an example.

One of the most celebrated vocalists of her time, Carter was noted for her improvisational approach to singing that influenced generations. She was one of the first jazz artists to found her own independent record label, Bet-Car Records. She also was the founder of the Jazz Ahead program at Fort Greene’s Brooklyn Academy of Music and was instrumental in discovering artists including John Hicks, Marc Cary, Mulgrew Miller and Cyrus Chestnut. A contemporary of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Carter is rarely mentioned in the same terms as those two or other giants of the genre.

“[Betty] created a whole lineage of study of jazz music,” says singer-flutist Melanie Charles. “I think that her doing ‘Jazz Ain’t Nothin’ But Soul’ was important to add her perspective to the table. That very lyric is at the core of what I’m about — jazz is ‘taters and grits.’ Forget about respectability politics! Even though Betty is the highest evolution of jazz, she was still a full Black woman.”

With “Y’all Don’t (Really) Care About Black Women,” Charles pays tribute to those that preceded her as she reimagines the work of luminaries such as Carter, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Abbey Lincoln and Sarah Vaughan. She also drew inspiration from several of the female figures in her own life and career, but there was one young woman in particular who helped guide the ultimate direction for this project.

“[When] it was time to start making decisions about the pieces, it was around the time of Breonna Taylor,” Charles says. “It was clear to me that if I’m going to do a remix project right now, it needs to be songs sung by women who have always [tried] to communicate our experience in this country.

“As Black women, it is complicated for us to manifest love and being loved and being in relationships,” Charles continues. “And I think a lot of it sends out how we sometimes don’t know how to ask for care and consideration because culturally, we’re the backbone — ‘I got this’ or ‘I can do this.’ I’m tired of that. The way that no justice has been done for Breonna — like George Floyd took over everything. I’m not saying that one death is more important than the other. It’s just that what is resounding for me is that this Black woman’s life is gone and we are really chill about it.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/melanie-charles-black-women-jazz/2021/11/10/adc8586a-4179-11ec-a3aa-0255edc02eb7_story.html

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