Over a period of just six months, eminent jazz vocalist and composer Nnenna Freelon's life changed irrevocably. Her soulmate and husband of nearly forty years, the renowned architect Phil Freelon, passed away from ALS, her sister Debbie succumbed to cancer, and the family dog, Basie, died as well. In the immediate wake of these compounding losses, Freelon could not find a way to process or understand her grief and lost the ability to read, sing, and improvise. The inner melody that had vibrated inside of her since childhood went silent. She then realized that the only way to move forward was to lean in to her grief. Part love story, part homage to jazz, and part guide to creative practice within bereavement, Beneath the Skin of Sorrow follows Freelon's difficult and personal journey to healing. Calling on the improvisational skills that she had built over her forty-year career as a jazz singer, Freelon crafted her new reality by improvising - thinking about grieving as a series of small, daily engagements with the world around her. Slowly, Freelon regained the pieces of her musical sensibility, realizing that flowing between words spoken and words sung allowed her understand what could not be fully realized in either realm. By improvising a new life, Freelon forged a new companionship between grief, art, and daily life. In the essays, poems, lyrics, and explorations of jazz standards that comprise this lyrical and elegiac memoir, Freelon shows how thinking about grief as an exercise in improvisation can lead to a creative coexistence with grief in all its forms.
Industry Reviews
"Nnenna Freelon's resonant and skilled voice sings through this genre-bending, profoundly performative text. As she explores with passion and sorrow the multifaceted spaces of grief-a subject that becomes more and more a part of our national discourse-she has crafted a compelling, elegant, and extraordinary book." - Karla F. C. Holloway, author of Gone Missing in Harlem: A Novel "This deeply learned, uniquely beautiful book is full of brilliant insights into the deep philosophical and spiritual dimensions of grief and its relationship to creativity by one of our foremost artists. Nnenna Freelon's serious intellectual and artistic reflections search for the possibilities to be found in grief. Not in avoiding it, but in going there, living with and through, listening closely to it, and seeing anew through it." - Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays "Beneath the Skin of Sorrow is a sensuous, subliminal, and sacred siren that embraces an intimate void reminding us all that those silenced in death become defiant choruses in the forest. Nnenna Freelon has woven a rich forest for the wailing of losses texturized by remembrances of joy. This text is a tender requiem for all the portals closed and all the portals reopened inside of her journey with grief. She acknowledges that her history is now on fire but her illuminating heart invites us to this new interior that looms with raging unapologetic truth." - Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate.
