Seated on a couch in downtown West Hollywood, her peroxided Afro in an orange headwrap and her elderly white terrier sprawled across her lap, the singer known as Lady Blackbird is seething. Moments before we’d been chatting amiably about her acclaimed 2021 debut Black Acid Soul, a work whose raw power and stripped down beauty have seen her hailed as the Grace Jones of jazz, and a soul sister to the iconic Nina Simone.
But I have just asked Lady Blackbird how she feels as a woman (as it happens, a queer woman of colour) living in America right now, what with the overturning of Roe V Wade and the rolling back of women’s rights. She’d probably agree that it’s been a hell of a few years for women and people of colour in the USA.
