“I’M ALL ABOUT TRYING TO LIVE THE LIVES THAT I SING ABOUT.”
When the world shut down last year, so did Alicia Olatuja. The St. Louis, Missouri-bred vocalist sat in her New Jersey apartment one day watching a video and started crying because she missed performing. The COVID lockdown had forced artists into a virtual atmosphere, in which they had to imagine the large crowds that they would normally see. But that was not so easy to do. For Olatuja, it wasn’t just live singing that she longed for; it was the chance to sprinkle seeds of hope and inspiration among the people who come to see her.
Since childhood, Olatuja has loved to sing. She handles multiple genres—opera, gospel, soul, jazz—with equal self-assurance and has become something of a chameleon, performing with everyone from vaunted gospel vocalist BeBe Winans and R&B diva Chaka Khan to jazz pianist Billy Childs and the late organ virtuoso Dr. Lonnie Smith. In 2013, a career-propelling moment came when she soloed with the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir at Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration.
Over the last few years, brick by brick, she’s been building a jazz audience, recording and releasing two solo albums (the most recent being 2019’s ). Her voice is inviting and elegant on some songs, seemingly powerful enough to slow down global warming on others. Yet the magic that Olatuja believes binds her to audiences has been missing for the
