Music News - posted on October 22, 2011 by RealDJVybe.com

Vybin It Up with Ledisi

Don’t sleep on the new fire from Ledisi. This woman can blow!

When I first got the Ledisi promos from the record pool, I initially thought that is was a female group due to the vocal variations from track to track. But I was wrong; it’s the diverse voice of a sexy, sultry black woman named Ledisi Anibade Young – American singer-songwriter and actress.

Ledisi Young (her given name meaning “to bring forth” in Nigerian) was born in the Big Easy, where she sang with the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra when she was eight years old and spent many adolescent hours watching her mother perform with a local R&B band, often in a nearby park. After the family relocated to Oakland, California, Ledisi followed her mother’s lead and sang in a local band, but left to form her own identity and her own group. She became widely noted for her performances in Beach Blanket Babylon, a long-running San Francisco-based cabaret featuring song parodies, celebrity impersonations, and enormous hats; she got the gig after being nominated for a Shellie Award in 1990 for her role as Dorothy in a local version of The Wiz.

She later formed Anibade (Ledisi’s middle name), which depending on what you read, means “to bring forth luck” or “my mother is great” in Yorubu. The band featured Sundra Manning (keyboards and chief songwriter), Cedricke Dennis (guitar), Nelson Braxton (bass), Wayne Braxton (saxophone), and Tommy Bradford (drums); while the lineup was similar to Chaka Khan & Rufus, the sound — on record anyway — is mellower than Rufus’ energized, excellently engineered sounds, sometimes fusing R&B, hip-hop, urban, jazz, and funk in the same pot. Ledisi and her band built a hot reputation in the Bay area at local clubs such as Bruno’s, The Black Cat, and Rasselas. Fans kept asking about a record, so the band cut a demo, “Take Time,” that radio station KMEL aired and received a good response; this prompted Ledisi to seek a deal with major recording companies, all of which praised and turned her down in the same breath. Frustrated but not thwarted, Ledisi cut the critically acclaimed Soulsinger and released it on LeSun Records (owned by Ledisi and Manning) on January 1, 2000. “Papa Loved to Love Me” — a personal account of a father sexually abusing his daughter — is one of the CD’s most riveting and controversial tracks.

You can follow my conversation with Ledisi on Twitter @realdjvybe or @ledisi on Twitter.com.

Artist bio licensed under GFDL from Wikipedia.