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Artist
Natalia M. King
12+ albums
jazzfemale vocalistssinger-songwriterUSAfemale vocalist
about
She’s a frail, gracious person with an astonishingly powerful, incantatory voice – one that cracks like a whip, resounding and opening itself up entirely, with neither mannerisms nor ornaments, and often bordering on a cry – and also a musical individuality that is atypical, and openly left-field. A mature, inhabited work that comes as a consecration of the talent and strong personality of this young, Afro-American lady of 33 whose activities reach widely (she sings, composes, writes, arranges and plays a marvellous guitar), and whose character is demanding, inspired, spontaneous, extraordinarily lucid and wide-awake. “Nothing is sure, nothing’s durable, nothing is definitive, nothing fixed,” she says. “Everything is movement.” Movement: the word sticks literally to the biography of this woman burning with life and saturated with energy, a “yearning soul” brimming over with desire and humour. Of Dominican origin, she was born in 1969 in Brooklyn’s Latino-American district. We can imagine her childhood was filled with suffering. Her relationship with her mother (who raised Natalia and her brother alone) was passionate and conflicting: “I owe her what I am. And my anger, too.” When she was an adolescent she left the “barrio” to settle with her family in Rochester, N.Y. At University, Natalia studied sociology for a time, also History and the work of the English Humanist poet of the Middle Ages, John de Salsbury (“Out of a taste for the exotic,” she explains, “and to plunge
