ONE-WOMAN ORCHESTRA

Georgia Anne Muldrow laughs easily when she speaks. The charm of her laughter does not come from anything silly, although she can be downright funny in frank conversation. Rather, the breathy chortle you hear when speaking with the free, funky progressive jazz/R&B/hip-hop multi-hyphenate expresses sheer joy at the fact that music is an everyday part of her self-empowered existence, and that all of her sound and all of her life flows into, and from, one towering tributary: her soul.

“Thank you so much for knowing that, because it is all ongoing and going on, all at once,” Muldrow says from her forever home in Los Angeles, a studio-house environment where she’s been letting loose with spirited left-field jazz and sumptuous space soul ever since her 2006 debut, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth. “There really isn’t demarcation, a place where one stops and the other begins. I’m always making music.” And it is always making Muldrow.

In discussing that which she does under her own name as a vocalist/instrumentalist (e.g., albums like 2010’s ), as showcases for her Technicolor production skills (three VWETO albums, the latest being ), or through the pseudonym Jyoti, a name given to her by free-jazz giant Alice Coltrane (the latest album to use that moniker being 2020’s ), Muldrow has found herself compared to Lauryn Hill, early Roberta Flack, Geri Allen, Amina Claudine Myers, Erykah Badu (with whom she’s worked), and the late great Mrs. Coltrane. Yet listening to the multitudes that fill (everything from cool postbop and thundering dub to Blaxploitative soul) or the transcendental jazz of —both albums recorded