Award-winning vocalist Jazzmeia Horn announces her ever-expanding talents with the release of her first big-band effort, Dear Love, a recording that brims with the combination of her assured delivery and spoken word segments, deft arrangements, and fiery musical ideas. Garnering praise from critics and fans alike, Dear Love is nominated for the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album Grammy Award. 

While the album functions as a platform for Horn to showcase both her perception of the world and her endlessly unfolding talents, it also granted the composer a setting to expound on personal experiences, shuttling them through a unique musical prism. 

“’Where We Are’ really speaks on my history — where my ancestors have been and where we are now,” Horn says about a track on the album, which was released September 10, 2021 on the vocalist’s own Empress Legacy Records.  

Elsewhere on Dear Love, Horn swings on an interpretation of classics “He’s My Guy” and “Lover Come Back to Me;” displays her vocal range and ability to summon the emotional content of her writing on the slinky “Let Us;” contemplates purpose on the subtle and intriguing “NIA;” and closes the album with “Where is Freedom!?,” a tune deeply rooted in a vamp that would have suited Nina Simone. 

Upon releasing the album, the 30-year-old Horn also published a book detailing her vocal technique and helped to produce a documentary that followed the making of Dear Love. 

The album, film, and book come on the heels of two widely praised long-players, A Social Call and Love and Liberation, which each garnered Grammy nominations in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category. The reaction to Horn’s work shouldn’t be a surprise, though. By the time her first album was released, she had collected top honors at the 2013 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition and the 2015 Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Competition. 

Horn’s talents emerged in Dallas, Texas, and blossomed at an arts-focused high school. The subsequent years, residing in New York and touring the world, have revealed a restless aesthetic development that has defined Horn’s still-burgeoning career. And while Dear Love might seem to be the work of an avowed veteran, the bandleader still has more of herself, her music, and her ideas to explore. 

“I tried to figure out how the songs can be in alignment with what’s true to me and what’s true in my reality as a Black woman, but then also be relatable to anyone who’s not part of my culture,” Horn says. “These songs are love letters to everyone.” 

To learn more about Jazzmeia Horn, please visit her website and follow her on Facebook.