Laura Ann Singh: The Blossoming of a Wildwood Flower

by Charles McGuigan 04.2018

Laura Ann Singh sits on the couch in her sun-washed living room on a day that bursts suddenly with the full promise of spring after many false starts. Coats are long-last shed, and the temperature rises slow and steady as sap. A time of expectation and hope, two weeks before Easter.

Her sea-green eyes widen as she begins describing her childhood in Kingsport, Tennessee.  Laura Ann’s ancestors were all Scotts-Irish and Irish, who settled in East Tennessee and the coalfields of central Kentucky generations ago. Her grandfather had built a small grocery store chain in Kingsport called Oakwood Markets.

Music filled Laura Ann’s childhood home thanks in large part to her parents Wallace and Jan Boyd. “Something that I have always kind of marveled at is that we grew up singing socially,” Laura says. “If we went camping or had just finished a meal, people would sit around and sing. On long car trips, my mother would teach us a song. She would teach me a high part, and my sister a low part, and we would sing three parts together. That’s how I learned to hear harmony.” Her father played guitar as well as piano. “So we always had music around the house,” says Laura Ann. 

She tells me how her mother or father used to sing her to sleep, something she does with her own daughter today. “I sing the old hymns my mom would sing to me, hymns she learned from her mother and her grandmother,” she says.

Then Laura Ann closes her eyes, raises her head, and her mouth opens, and the words pour out, soothing as a balm. 

“Peace, peace, wonderful peace,

Coming down from the Father above.”

 As she sings, the sunlight in the room seems to intensify.

As a teenager, Laura Ann and her friends would sometimes travel twenty minutes north to Hiltons, Virginia, home of the Carter Family Fold. It was an unassuming music venue housed in an old barn, the inside of which was lined with tiers of well-worn bus seats, and every Saturday night a different bluegrass band would perform there. “June Carter’s grandkids are still running the place, “ Laura Ann tells me. “And Johnny Cash gave his last performance there a couple months before he died. They wheeled him out in a wheelchair, and he sang a few songs.”

After a pause, she says, “There was a lot of music around that area, and though it wasn’t the music I ended up with, it was still music.”

Laura Ann’s grandparents also shared their music with her. “My grandparents loved big band music, so they introduced me to the early jazz sound in the United States,” says Laura Ann “And through that I got interested in Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, some of the crooners. So that was cultivated by them a little bit.”

And Laura Ann’s mother was, and always has been, supportive of her daughter’s music career. “My mom was one of my biggest advocates,” she says. “Being a musician is really not very glamorous, and so a lot of times I’ve wanted to quit. And she’s really pushed me to stay in it, and not pushed me as in a stage momish way at all. She would say, ‘This is what you’re good at, this is what you’re meant to do. Don’t give up.’ Both my parents have always been supportive, and so has my husband.” 

When she was just eight years old, Laura Ann asked for an unusual present for a child of her age.  “I wanted a French-English dictionary for my birthday because I’ve always been fascinated by other cultures and language especially,” she says. “It shapes how you think, it shapes how you express yourself.”

In high school, a boy she had a crush on gave Laura Ann a mixtape. Among all the songs, one stood out and struck something deep within the girl. It was a piece performed by Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto, and titled “Desafinado”.  Gilberto who wrote the song (he also wrote “The Girl from Impanema”) was one of the progenitors of a new kind of music in the 1950s and 1960s—a sort of jazz-influenced version of Samba called Bossa Nova, which quickly spread around the world. The voices are almost feathery, the four-against-five rhythm velvety. But the young Laura Ann knew nothing about any of this.

“That was the first time I had ever heard anything Brazilian,” she tells me. “And it stayed with me.”

As a senior at Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Laura Ann listened to Paul Simon’s “Graceland” a million times over, and was blown away by the breadth of it. That same year she toured colleges throughout the state—James Madison, University of Virginia, William and Mary, and University of Richmond. She decided on UR because of a concert they would be holding during her first semester there. “Ladysmith Black Mambazo was going to be playing at the Modlin Center,” she remembers. “And honestly that’s why I applied.”

But Laura Ann didn’t study music at the university. Instead, she majored in international studies. She minored in music for a time, but it wasn’t to her liking because the program was classically focused. 

During her senior year in college she met Kevin Harding, and after graduation they began playing gigs together at the Tobacco Company. They mainly did standards, but would throw in a couple of Bossa Nova numbers as well. “And then eventually we ended up learning these songs and started this band called Quatro Na Bossa,” says Laura Ann. “Kevin played rhythm and lead, Aaron Binder was the original drummer, Randall Pharr bass player, and I was singing.”

Their focus was always Brazilian music—Bossa Nova, specifically—and they began landing gigs around town, and then on to the Big Apple. 

“We got hooked up with this guy in New York who started booking us every year for a week-long run at Dizzy’s Club,” Laura Ann says.

By the by, Laura Ann would move into another music project with one of her best friends, Marlysse Simmons, keyboard player and music director for Bio Ritmo. 

 “Miramar is the name of that group,” she says. She sings duets with Rei Alvarez, also of Bio Ritmo, and Marlysse plays keyboard or organ, with Rusty Farmer on bass, and Hector “Coco” on percussion. 

“Boleros span all of Latin America,” Laura Ann says.  “Miramar is kind of a romantic project that is more of a listening thing and less of a dancing thing. It’s a more intensive listening experience than Bio Ritmo.”

It’s been about decade now that Miramar has been performing. “This was a kind of a passion project for us,” says Laura Ann. “Marlysse is just one of these people who absolutely has a focused idea of what she wants to accomplish musically, and she makes it happen.”

And happen it did. “We started performing with a string quartet in concerts,” Laura Ann says. A few years back they released a record, did an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, and performed at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in DC and the Elebash Recital Hall in Manhattan. 

Laura smiles broadly. “We were number one on Amazon for Latin music for a few hours,” she says with boisterous laugh. “And we just did globalFEST in New York, which is this giant showcase.” 

When the family relocated temporarily to San Francisco, and Laura Ann took a hiatus to spend more time with her daughter, things for Miramar began to mushroom.

 “We played the Lincoln Center outdoor concert series,” says Laura Ann. “We had a little tour of the Midwest through Chicago and Minneapolis. It was a great time for me. It opened my eyes. The benefit of having a friend like Marlysse is she just pushes for things she believes in.” 

Last month Miramar cut a 45 for Brooklyn-based Daptone Records. One side is “Salida”; the flip side is “Urgencia”. And both songs were written by Rei and Marlysse. “They called us to come in and do this because they want to release some Latin music,” Laura Ann says.

She remembers when both those songs were being crafted. “It’s really fun to watch songs evolve,” says Laura Ann. “I do write songs, but they’re mostly for me. They’re not great necessarily. That’s not one of my great gifts. But I love watching these songs evolve, and I feel like I’ve had input, and I feel like I definitely have ideas about how they should be shaped and formed.”

She recalls one song Miramar had been playing. Laura Ann liked it, but sensed there was something missing. “I thought it was beautiful,“ she says. “But then Marlysse added this string arrangement and this really small percussion part, and for me it just started to shimmer when we played it.”

Laura Ann mentions one of her favorite songs, “The Nearness of You” by Hoagy Carmichael and Ned Washington, and as she begins to sing it, the room shimmers up until the final note.

“It’s amazing how much music draws out of us,” she says, taking a deep breath.  “The season in my life when I would go out and sing for three or four hours a night in a loud room is not that appealing to me now. But I am so grateful for the ten or twelve years I spent doing that.”

In the current season of her life, Laura Ann is enthusiastic with projects like Miramar that give her audiences a different kind of experience.  “I think we’re so inundated by sound and noise that people don’t realize what it does when you pause and turn your attention toward something that’s as transcendent as music,” she says. “Miramar has kind of demanded that people pause and listen.”

Laura Ann then asks me to consider beauty. “I’m a big fan of John Muir,” she says. “And exposing yourself to beauty is very important to our well-being. Culturally we’ve become inured to that idea. We ignore our spiritual sides, but we’re still spiritual beings that need to be nourished.”

She then tells me what performing music does for her. “When I’m singing, I feel the fullest,” she says. “When I’m singing, I feel whole, and that’s a really precious thing. I don’t know that I feel that way much in any other sphere in my life.”

 Throughout the interview we can hear the twitter and the trill of birds just outside her house.   “There’s something about music that connects us to the Divine,” she says. “It’s like being outside and witnessing beautiful things in nature. There’s something in us that needs that kind of nourishment.”

 And then she talks about her own spiritual beliefs and how they intersect with her music.

“Faith is so important to me because it says there’s higher consciousness, there’s higher purpose and we’re all complicated and we contradict ourselves,” says Laura Ann Singh. “We do things we don’t want to do; and then we don’t do things we want to do.  But still God loves us, and He actually cares about the minutiae of our day and our lives, and cares about the things that oppress us, that keep us from being our fullest selves. And that’s what it is for me, ‘Who am I really, who am I essentially? And can I get to that point where I felt that wholeness permeating more of my life?’ That’s the same kind of wholeness and fullness I get when I sing. Music reflects, and does not deny the Divine.”