For Somi, Blooming Means Coming Home to Herself

Every month, OkayAfrica spotlights an exceptional African artist shaping African music and culture. From rising stars shaping new sounds to established artists driving culture forward, this series gives us a stage to celebrate incredible, ingenious African artistry.

At some point while making her new album, Somi found herself trying to explain to her brother the kind of sound she was aiming for.

It was not a genre exactly. It wasn't simply jazz, highlife, or any of the other forms her work has moved through over the years. Somi was searching for a sound expansive enough to hold the many places, influences, and selves that shape her work.

“I was trying to get to this sound that’s all of me,” she tells OkayAfrica from Nairobi, her home base on the continent, as she shuttles between Africa and New York.

Throughout her career, the Grammy-nominated American vocalist, composer, actor and playwright of Ugandan-Rwandan origin has often made music through the language of place.

On The Lagos Music Salon, she mapped Lagos as both a city and a creative awakening. On Petite Afrique, she turned to Harlem and the dignity of African immigrant communities in the U.S. And on Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba, she entered the artistic and political inheritance of one of Africa’s most important global voices.

But on What Does It Take to Bloom?, released in August, that instinct turns inward. Somi realized she was no longer only mapping somewhere or someone else. With this project, the places, histories, and sounds she has long followed began to point back to her.

“I didn’t know that I was going to— in the end—be like, ‘Oh, this is actually just a mapping of myself,’” she says. “It’s actually also about place, even if it’s because I’ve been away from place.”

In all of this, Somi has also been thinking about where she fits in the long line of African women artists who came before her. She recently completed her PhD at Harvard, and part of that work examined African women’s voices, especially how they are heard, remembered, and documented. While in the program, one question kept coming back to her: “How do you historicize your own work?”

For an artist who had already spent years thinking through Miriam Makeba’s legacy, the question exposed a gap. Somi says she found very little serious scholarship on Makeba’s music and performance, especially when compared with the thousands of texts written about an artist like Nina Simone.

“How am I supposed to then read myself in this theoretical canon in music if nobody’s even read this first woman who showed up on the global cultural stage?” she asks.

That question runs alongside the album. What Does It Take to Bloom? is about turning inward, but Somi is not looking at herself alone. She is also looking at the women, places, sounds, and histories that helped make her.

The realization came late. With this album, Somi had actually started out with another location-driven idea. Her original plan was to travel through different African countries, working with a different producer in each. She began in Senegal and then moved on to Nigeria. There, a planned collaboration with Benjamin James of The Cavemen kept expanding. One song became several, and eventually Somi and James decided to make the record together.

“That was not the plan,” she says. “[But] in the end, it was such a gift.” 

That collaboration produced “Sometimes Love,” an exploration of love in its many ever-changing forms. The song’s lyric video, directed by Somi herself and filmed on location at Kaswa Lodge Farm & Tea Plantation in Fort Portal, Uganda, also brings the project back to East Africa.

The song is one example of how What Does It Take to Bloom? moves across the different parts of Somi’s musical world. “So You Want to Be a Woman” with Lakecia Benjamin draws most clearly from her jazz background, with live takes and the interplay of her longtime band. Somi’s voice remains center, soaring when it needs to and pulling back when the moment asks for restraint. “Interlude: Skin to Skin” is another standout, featuring Senegalese guitarist Hervé Samb — whose playing evokes the kora — set against bass-heavy, electronic production.

“It’s never meant to be neatly jazz,” Somi explains. “None of my albums all fit neatly because I don’t fit neatly.”

For Somi,  part of the lesson from this album is that not fitting neatly is where the work lives. In that same conversation about her sound, her brother suggested that the tension between all these worlds might be the interesting part. The thought stayed with her.

“Sometimes it can be quite frustrating that you don’t feel like you belong in this or that,” she says. “But I’m also good with standing in the middle.”

That middle has often been called jazz, and Somi does not reject the label. At a recent dinner in Nairobi, she recalls that when someone introduced her as a jazz singer, the moment amused her because the label was both true and too small.

“The jazz economy has given me a career,” she explains. Jazz, as she sees it, makes room for experimentation, improvisation, and freedom. These qualities echo her own identity as an African woman moving through the world.

“I didn’t set out to be a jazz singer per se,” she says. “I’m a song maker first and foremost. I’m an African woman, and I’m a song maker and a storyteller.”

On What Does It Take to Bloom?, all of those parts of Somi come together. For her, this album brings her back to music, the place where she first found her voice.

“It’s about coming home to myself,” she says. “Home is actually always going to be in the music.”