Jazz in the jail: an uplift for souls in need

posted on: May 7, 2015

You don’t need a master’s degree to know that jail inmates are lonely, but during the past year, cultural anthropologist Naima Shalhoub has seen it doesn’t take much, or cost much, to make them feel less isolated and sad.

The difference between happy and unhappy just might be eight minutes. That’s the time it took for Shalhoub, also a jazz artist, to sing three songs on her first visit to a women’s unit at the San Francisco County Jail a year ago, right around Mother’s Day.

“One woman said, ‘I’ve been here two years and this is the happiest I’ve felt,’” she recalled during a visit to the women’s unit on Tuesday. With feedback so powerful, she had to come back, and has taught music therapy classes almost every Friday since.

For this Mother’s Day, Shalhoub went further: She and a four-piece band performed a 45-minute concert in the jail’s E pod on Tuesday, and recorded it before a captive audience of 50 female inmates, a first in the jail’s history. The album, to be titled “Borderlands: Singing Through the Prison Walls,” will feature songs with themes of freedom and borders, written by Shalhoub. Accompanying her were Isaac Ho on keyboard, Tarik Kazaleh on guitar and oud, Aaron Kierbel on drums, and Marcus Shelby on bass. Rhodessa Jones of the Medea Project kicked the program off.

Shalhoub, whose vocal style has an Edie Brickell-meets-Sade sort of quality, and whose music is influenced by Billie Holiday, African rhythms, Arabic songs, soul and blues, was at turns wistful, haunting and powerfully growling. Within moments of her first note, the inmates were clapping in time, singing along and dancing in their seats. Her “Oh Sky” found favor with the audience: (“Oh sky, tell me what to do/ show me where’s the light/ ’cause every path I try to walk/ just don’t feel right”), as did a lively rap by the guitarist in the song’s middle, which led to a standing ovation at the number’s end.

Source: www.sfchronicle.com