Emma Smith interview: on Meshuga Baby, her Jewish heritage and how she’s had to deal with the misogyny that’s still rife in the jazz world

“It feels so good,” Emma Smith notes about finally releasing new music into the world, 10 years after her acclaimed debut, The Huntress. As a long-established vocalist touring with marquee acts including Michael Bublé, Robbie Williams, Georgie Fame, Cyndi Lauper and Seal, Smith’s long-awaited follow-up, the remarkable Meshuga Baby, has finally hit the streets.

“Other artists mark their development every couple of years, whereas mine feels like: Child, Woman,” she laughs.

Life got in the way of making Meshuga Baby – the album’s creation was intimately bound up with Smith discovering her Jewish heritage, plus there was the small matter of Covid to navigate. And the virus wasn’t the only unforeseen consideration that Smith had to wrestle with.

“My voice changed, not necessarily because of Covid, because I wasn't singing. It changed because the space from relentlessly gigging, relentlessly teaching, or whatever it was I was doing, allowed me to welcome my authentic self in a much bigger and full-bodied way, and actually changed not just the way that I made music and improvised, but the way that I vocalised.

“I was fearful of the more ugly sounds that the female voice makes. I had spent 10 years making a pretty, elegant, feminine sound with my voice and even with my improvising” – Smith, sipping a glass of red wine on the top deck of a London bus/bar in Wood Green, peels off an impressive scat at this point by way of example – “as opposed to big, nasal, poky, and plummy, how Sarah Vaughan moves through a verse with all of these different sounds. I was terrified of that, and the space away from gigging made me dive straight into it. I had to re-record about 60 per cent of the album, but was very conscious of not losing that in-the-room spirit I have with those three lads” – namely Smith’s brilliant trio of pianist Jamie Safir, bassist Conor Chaplin and drummer Luke Tomlinson.

The title itself, Meshuga Baby, consciously nods to her Jewish heritage. 'Meshuge', the Yiddish word for 'crazy', is one of several words that Smith notes are very specifically associated with women – she cites bossy, psycho and loud as further examples. Men, on the other hand, are seen as ambitious, driven, and as taking action.

“There's such an internal battle in me to be smaller, more delicate, to take up less space. It's been really detrimental to my confidence in actually putting myself out there, which is probably the real reason it's taken me so long to release an album. It's all very well hiding behind the Ronnie Scott's All Stars, or hiding behind Michael Bublé in a setting of two other girls. But going out there just as me, with only my name on the front cover, it's taken me this amount of time in the industry to be okay with taking up space.”

A member of vocal harmony group The Puppini Sisters and the Ronnie Scott’s All Stars; winner of the Rising Star Award (London Music Awards) and the Worshipful Company of Musicians Young Jazz Musician of the Year; a finalist in the Montreux Jazz Voice Competition, and nominated in the Jazz Vocalist of the Year category in this year’s Parliamentary Jazz Awards, Smith’s internal battle in terms of taking up space has played out in the context of often being the only female – whether in NYJO (which she joined as featured vocalist aged 15), music conservatoire (the only female out of 40 students on the jazz course), or in big band settings (“although that's changing” she notes). Has she experienced sexism or discrimination within this world?

“Yeah, terribly, over the years. I was aware of it from a young age. I was harassed by one of my teachers. For a year, he would turn up outside my apartment in his posh car, leave his wife and kids at home, and I would lay on my bedroom floor with the lights off, so he didn't know I was in. I’ve been in multiple WhatsApp groups where I'm the only girl in the big band, and everyone would superimpose a penis instead of a microphone. They say, oh come on, it's a joke, but it gets pretty tiresome. Recently I had one of my hero American musicians slide in my DMs on Instagram, which I was really excited about. He said I'm coming to London Jazz Festival, I'd love to meet you. I was like, oh my God, amazing. Then about a minute later he came back: 'I've got to ask you a question though, are your tits real?' It's really baffling – fair enough if they're thinking it, but to say it out loud really shows me that men think they're untouchable in this industry.

“That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Because of my requests about promotion, ‘hey, can you connect me with whoever’ or ‘can we talk about having a photographer on site’, I got called a two-headed monster by a jazz club owner and was literally in floods of tears in his office.

"It's getting better in a semi tokenistic way – ooh, let’s book all these young women and make us look woke and diverse – but there are big gaps and the core is rotten, essentially.”

If the culture within jazz is shaped by both the musicians themselves and the gatekeepers – the labels, festival directors, club owners, journalists – it appears that instilling even the most basic respectful behaviour within this male-dominated world is still some way off.

During lockdown, Smith’s deep immersion into her Jewish heritage came as something of a revelation, as it was a subject that was simply not up for discussion among her immediate family.

“There's a terrible pattern with Jewish families that’s way more common than you would think – that, post-World War Two, non-religious Jews decided not to bring it into the lives of their children, my parents’ generation. Many stories and many amazing people in our ancestry, people that survived hideous things, are not talked about and not honoured. This is what happened in my family. There are certain physical features I have – my curly hair, or my different nose, or my fuller lips – that make me stand out from the crowd. When I came back from school one day and was like, oh, they said I had a Jewish nose, my dad said you can't say that around your mother. I left it alone because it was clear that it was off limits.”

Later, Smith discovered from her grandmother that all her ancestors on her mother's side were Jewish – her maternal grandmother the daughter of Russian Jewish parents, her maternal grandfather the son of German Jewish parents.

At a post-gig CD signing on the first date of her American-ish Songbook tour in April this year, she met family members she didn’t even know existed. “I bawled my eyes out. In terms of my Jewishness, it's beautiful because it's made me feel that my efforts and my immersion has come to fruition in more ways than one. It's very important to me that that's part of my narrative.”

Self-released on her own Wingsor Castle Records (“my flat is always full of chicken wings” explains Smith), Meshuga Baby was close to clocking up 650,000-plus streams on Spotify when this article went to press. How is that possible, barely a month after its release?

“Because I'm cool, because people love swing again,” she jokes. “As an unsigned act, I didn't do this album for any other reason than to feel satisfied with what I have offered to the musical sphere.

"It's given me the freedom to check with every song: do I love this, does this make me laugh out loud or move me to tears? And the answer is yes. If this is my last album, then I'm cool with that. I hope it's not, but if I died tomorrow, I'd be like, I'm okay, I'm happy with that.”

Emma Smith plays the EFG London Jazz Festival with The Big Swing at Cadogan Hall on 18 November: efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk

This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of Jazzwise magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today