VIOLA

Washington, DC · b. 1999 · FARA Records

VIOLA (Viola Nesbitt, b. 23 March 1999, Washington, DC) grew up in Shaw, a few streets from the stretch of U Street that was called Black Broadway for most of the twentieth century, in a city that was seventy per cent Black when her mother was born and isn't now. Between the ages of ten and twenty-seven she watched the neighbourhood change around her almost completely — the shops, the churches, the rooms where things happened. That's the fact underneath this record: it's a song about a room where you can put your weight down, written by somebody whose city has spent her whole adult life taking rooms away. She found her way in through church choir first, in the ordinary way — she sang because everybody did and turned out to be good at it. What changed things was hearing old New York garage records at about nineteen and recognising the chords: the same voicings, the same lift, the same thing being done to a room, in a completely different building. She's been trying to get those two rooms into the same record ever since, and this is the closest she's come.

Full, warm and gospel-trained, with genuine power she deploys late and sparingly. Her verses sit low and conversational and the lift only arrives at the chorus, which is the correct architecture for this genre and considerably harder than simply singing big throughout. No melisma to speak of and no runs — she landed on that early and has stuck to it. The other thing she brings, and the unusual one, is the swing: her sense of where a beat sits comes from go-go rather than from house — DC's own genre, percussion-led and continuous, built on congas and cowbell, that grew up in the background of everything around her — which gives her records a percussive push that people notice without being able to name. Her influences run the New York garage-house tradition and the gospel voicings underneath it — the lineage that runs from the church into the Paradise Garage and out into forty years of records — alongside go-go itself, which taught her that a groove doesn't have to stop between songs.

Genuinely friendly and entirely without performance — one of those singers who talks to a room like it's a kitchen and then does something enormous, and the gap between the two is a large part of why it lands. She doesn't do the arms-out thing and doesn't need to. She recognised New York garage chords at nineteen as the same voicings she'd been singing in church since she was seven, and has been trying to get both rooms into one record ever since. She holds everything back until the chorus — producers keep asking her to open up earlier and she keeps declining, politely, every time. She's from a city most of the music industry doesn't treat as a music city, and will correct anyone who says so within about four seconds. Warm, exacting, unsentimental.