Chrisette Michele, I Am
By Mark Anthony Neal
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Editor

When most audiences were introduced to Chrisette Michele, she was wrapping Jay Z’s lament about lost friends, lost families and lost loves with warm sisterly kisses. Weeks later she was a throwback chanteuse from the jazz age of the 1920s, endowing Nas’s plea for immortality, with the verve and brashness of Harlem Renaissance-era writers who gave the jazz age its meaning. With both songs, Jay Z’s “Lost Ones” an Nas\s “Can’t Forget About You”, my inclination was to check the liner notes (“What are those?” says the boy to the Ipod) to find out which coquetish, dead jazz diva had been exhumed from her digital grave to provide the emotional depth that contemporary artists sometimes seem incapable of channeling. (Thinking favorably here, about Will.i.am’s brilliant pairing of Nina Simone and Mary J. Blige on the latter’s “About You”). At the very least, I wanted to confirm that Erykah Badu was back in the world. Chrisette Michele? Doesn’t ring a bell.

Chrisette Michele, I Am, says the 24-year-old woman from Long Island and, when pressed, she admits, “I been studying, Ms. Billie, Ms. Ella, Ms. Sarah Vaughn, and Ms. Natalie Cole.” (from “Let’s Rock”). Michele’s debut recording, I Am, is a curious collection, as much for the choice of songs as it is for the fact that the singer has been allowed to build from the ground a small, but growing audience. R&B singers barely a decade older than Michele—Deborah Cox and Amel Larrieux are the singers I’m thinking of specifically—have been banished from urban radio and find themselves either recording jazz standards or claiming stakes in the gospel music industry to find an audience. The clear message is that not only do these women have to compete with the Rhiannas and Ameries of the world, but also the Fergies and Nelly Fertados of the world. Quite frankly, save Mary J. Blige and perhaps Beyonce (though she too must be beginning to feel old), there is little room—or seemingly need—for grown Black women in contemporary R&B. But Chrisette Michele is too grown—her voice is too grown—to play to the expectations of an industry that still struggles to accept women and Black women in particular, on terms that these women define themselves.