The groundbreaking vocalist/composer/
“Serpa possesses a preternatural cool, injecting weightless sophistication and melodic grace into everything she touches.” – Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader,
“Sara Serpa is a vocalist wielding an instrument as favourably unadorned and pure as any in jazz… literally, she sounds as if she must sing whenever she speaks.” – Phil DiPietro, All About Jazz
Album Release Concert December 9 at Roulette, NYC
The voice of Sara Serpa possesses an innate intimacy, so subtle and graceful as to feel like a whispered confession no matter the lyric, or whether there’s a lyric at all. Writing about Night Birds, Serpa’s 2023 duo album with her husband, guitarist André Matos, Nate Chinen said that the music, “feels like a peek inside a private conversation; the depth of their musical interplay, an extension of their personal bond, has the sense of something irreplaceable and precious.”
Despite that, Serpa has long avoided writing her own lyrics because, she says, “they’re so personal and show so much about you.” With her breathtaking new album, Encounters and Collisions, she changes course, embracing the art of intimate revelation with the most autobiographical music of her career.
The themes that Serpa explores as the story of Encounters and Collisions unfolds will undoubtedly resonate with many of her listeners – compelling tales of migration, home, family, motherhood, loss and art. Not only does the singer reveal her experiences and emotions through her poetic, impressionistic lyrics, but she relates her personal history explicitly through an accompanying set of short narratives, as well as a book of hand-drawn comic strip-style illustrations that will be available for purchase in person or via the Biophilia website.
“The lyrics are an exercise in discovering how can I simplify the ideas and still make them somehow poetic or beautiful,” Serpa explains. “I wanted them to be not just plain text, but also reflect a very specific mood, emotion and feeling.”
Serpa didn’t originally set out to create such an autobiographical work. Her original intention was to adapt another writer’s work along the lines of her acclaimed 2021 album and multimedia performance Intimate Strangers, a collaboration with the Nigerian writer and critic Emmanuel Iduma. The new project proved frustrating, however, and she discovered during the process that the ideas that she was responding to in other authors’ work were the ones that reflected her own journey. The focus immediately shifted.
“The elements of the story that I connected with were things like migration, being in a new country, dealing with languages, missing home, losing some kind of identity and having to build a new one,” she relates. “Then throughout that process, becoming a mother with all the victories and losses that accompany that process. I realized that maybe I was writing about myself rather than someone else, and it started to make sense that I would write about my story.”
Encounters and Collisions charts the almost two decades since Serpa moved from her native Lisbon, Portugal to the United States to attend Berklee College of Music. Originally intending to stay for a year and then move home, she’s since established a home and a family in New York while garnering acclaim as one of the most captivating and inventive vocalists in modern jazz.
The album begins with “Language,” in which the singer contends with the necessity of translating oneself into an adopted tongue. The idea becomes woven through the remainder of the album, at times explicitly – as in her story of becoming a mother, when a fellow Portuguese speaker at the hospital puts her at much-welcome ease – but also implicitly, as she sings her lyrics in English. Serpa is widely hailed for her gorgeous ability to sing wordlessly, often becoming an ethereal instrument within the various ensembles in which she plays. Encounters and Collisions is her most lyric-heavy project to date, and the English words reveal her gift for expressing herself in a language not wholly her own.
The frantic “Visa,” accompanied by a chaos of pointillist sounds, captures the overwhelming confusion and fear of navigating the bureaucracy of a foreign government. The oppressive piano chords of “Things Must Move Quickly” depict the more high-pressure tempo of life in the States as compared to Portugal. “Between Two Worlds” settles into the purgatory of acclimating oneself to a never completely comfortable new country while losing the connection to home: “Your roots vanishing like fog.”
“Labor” and “A Mother’s Heart” bristle with the tension and joy of motherhood, the former a frenzied, angular portrait of childbirth, the letter a stunning love letter from mother to son. The stark “The Phone Call” recalls the shocking, sudden death of Serpa’s father, a devastating loss that severed one of her remaining ties to her native Lisbon. “Music Makes Me Who I Am” revels in the art form, before concluding with the uncertain wisdom of “Two Cities, Many Homes.”
To create the multifarious elements of Encounters and Collisions Serpa drew upon her early training in visual arts, recent classes at the New School on Illustrated Journalism and Memoir, and her deeply felt personal experiences. With all of that, her initial presentation of the music on stage was nerve-wracking –until she began to feel the connection she achieved with audiences.
“The most humbling thing is discovering that suddenly it’s not about me anymore,” she says. “It’s about all of us, and how we humans share so many experiences.”
