| Jazz |
Ledisi’s Voice for Dinah: A Modern Torchbearer for a Forgotten Queen
There are singers whose gifts are so prodigious that their success can seem inevitable, as though the path to acclaim had been laid before them from the start. Yet anyone who has followed the career of Ledisi knows that inevitability is an illusion: behind her effortless brilliance lies years of unrelenting work, fierce discipline, and a restless drive to expand the boundaries of what a modern artist can be. Singer, actress, writer, teacher, activist, entrepreneur, Ledisi inhabits all these roles with disarming ease, and now she adds another jewel to her crown with For Dinah, an album that is at once homage, reclamation, and statement of purpose.
From the very first track it is clear that this is no ordinary project. Produced by the formidable Christian McBride, himself one of the most respected bassists and composers of his generation—alongside Ledisi, For Dinah stands apart as an album that marries virtuosity with intention. It is conceived less as a retrospective than as a living conversation across time: Ledisi speaking directly to Dinah Washington, the legendary “Queen of the Blues,” who reigned in mid-century America and yet remains curiously under-recognized outside the circles of jazz aficionados.
Dinah Washington and the Soundtrack of a Changing Nation
To understand the resonance of For Dinah, one must situate Dinah Washington in the turbulent decades of her career. In the 1940s and ’50s, as the United States wrestled with segregation, Jim Crow laws, and the stirrings of the civil rights movement, Washington carved out space in a culture that offered Black women little room for visibility or authority. She commanded the stage with sharp wit and unapologetic confidence, refusing to soften her presence to accommodate a segregated public. Her voice, bright, crystalline, full of both bite and balm—embodied a kind of resistance in itself, a declaration that artistry could not be contained by prejudice.
Washington’s music crossed boundaries at a moment when crossing boundaries was itself a political act. Moving seamlessly between gospel, jazz, blues, and pop, she unsettled the categories that the music industry, and society, imposed. That versatility brought her mass appeal, but it also blurred the very distinctions that critics used to marginalize her. For Black audiences, she was a beacon; for Black women in particular, she was proof that one could claim space in a world determined to deny it.
Her influence on Aretha Franklin, who would go on to become the “Queen of Soul,” is well documented. Yet Washington’s own legacy, caught between genres and truncated by her early death, never reached the iconic heights of Franklin or Billie Holiday. That erasure makes Ledisi’s project all the more urgent: it is not only a musical homage, but a corrective to historical neglect.
Ledisi in the Present: A Heir of Voices, A Builder of Futures
Where Washington’s career unfolded against the backdrop of civil rights struggles, Ledisi’s artistry emerges in an era marked by new challenges: questions of equity within the music industry, representation in leadership, and the pressures of digital culture. Her response has been to extend her artistry into activism.
At Berklee College of Music, where she teaches and serves as artist-in-residence in the Gender Justice in Jazz program, Ledisi actively mentors the next generation, particularly women and artists of color who, like Washington before them, must learn to navigate structures not designed for them. Her leadership role as only the second Black woman to chair the Los Angeles chapter of the Recording Academy reflects her commitment to structural change from within.
Beyond institutional leadership, she also embraces the role of cultural elder, joining the historic Delta Sigma Theta sorority, a sisterhood of Black women leaders who frame their work as both cultural and political. Here, Ledisi stands in the lineage of figures such as Michelle J. Howard, Joy-Ann Reid, and Ambassador Shabazz, a contemporary “Justice League” of Black women who blend professional excellence with civic engagement.
Her activism is inseparable from her art. Just as Washington sang against the constraints of her time, Ledisi sings with the full awareness that visibility itself can be an act of resistance and affirmation. For Dinah therefore becomes more than a collection of songs: it is a dialogue across generations of Black women artists, each carving out space, each insisting that their voices will not be silenced.
A Living Conversation
The record achieves this through a combination of respect and reinvention. The arrangements, spare yet potent, are deliberately uncluttered; they allow for air, for resonance, for the possibility that silence itself can frame the voice. Christian McBride’s bass lines are particularly revelatory, whether anchoring a stark, unaccompanied introduction to “You Don’t Know What Love Is” or conversing with Ledisi in supple counterpoint.
Ledisi’s voice carries the project: expansive yet restrained, dazzling without ostentation. Whether gliding through Ellington’s “Caravan” or sparring playfully with Gregory Porter on “You’ve Got What It Takes,” she avoids mimicry in favor of dialogue. This is not Dinah resurrected but Dinah re-encountered, filtered through Ledisi’s own sensibility, her own experiences, her own convictions. The result is not nostalgia but renewal, a reminder that the past lives on most fully when reimagined in the present.
A Legacy of Continuity and Change
To listen to For Dinah is to hear not only the echo of Washington but also the continuity of a tradition: Black women artists insisting on their rightful place at the center of American culture. Washington sang in an era when such insistence was itself radical. Ledisi sings today in a moment when the struggle takes new forms but remains unfinished.
What emerges is a portrait of two women linked across time: one who broke barriers in an age of segregation, another who continues the fight for equity in an era of representation and institutional reform. For Dinah is not simply a record of songs but a meditation on what it means to carry a legacy forward, not as imitation, but as transformation.
In that sense, Ledisi’s tribute is also a declaration of her own place in the lineage. Just as Dinah Washington once expanded the definitions of jazz and blues, Ledisi broadens what it means to be an artist in the 21st century: not only a voice but a teacher, a leader, a writer, and a builder of futures. The album stands, finally, as a work of remembrance, renewal, and reverence, a bridge across generations, carried by a voice that insists on clarity, generosity, and grace.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, September 5th 2025
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Musicians on Ledisi’s For Dinah include:
Gregory Porter, Paul Jackson Jr., and Michael King, with Christian McBride serving as a producer and guest artist.
Other credited musicians are Sara Hewitt-Roth, McClenty Hunter Jr., Yuko Naito-Gotay, Lisa Matricardi, and Antoine Silverman.
The album was co-produced by Christian McBride and Rex Rideout.
Track Listing :
- Quelle différence un jour a fait
- Si je n’arrive jamais au paradis
- Caravan
- Faisons-le
- You Dont Know What Love Is, avec Christian McBride
- Youve Got What It Takes, avec Gregory Porter
- You Go To My Head, avec Paul Jackson Jr.
- The Bitter Earth