JazzTimes is honored to present the premiere of “Out the Window” by Jazzmeia Horn, which will appear on the singer’s second studio album Love and Liberation, scheduled for release August 23 on Concord Jazz.
Besides Horn’s vocal—which includes a forceful scat solo—the personnel on “Out the Window” consists of tenor saxophonist Stacy Dillard, trumpeter Josh Evans, pianist Victor Gould, bassist Ben Williams, and drummer Jamison Ross. Chris Dunn, who produced Horn’s 2017 debut album A Social Call, is back at the helm here.
Like the majority of the 12 songs on Love and Liberation, “Out the Window” is a Horn original. A total of only four album tracks were written by others: Jon Hendricks’ “No More,” Erykah Badu’s “Green Eyes,” Rachelle Ferrell’s “Reflection of My Heart,” and the Jimmy Van Heusen/Johnny Mercer evergreen “I Thought About You.”
About this particular track, Jazzmeia comments: “This has such a great Stacy moment—one of my favorite solos on the album. The message here is actually a double-edged sword: a woman who’s telling a man he needs to be careful because of another woman preying on him, but she herself has the same tendencies. But it’s also supposed to be fun. I was thinking of how Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald would handle this kind of song. I think you can hear a little bit of how a big band would do this if either of them were out in front. I love how it swings.”
Now 28, Horn is the winner of both the 2013 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition and the 2015 Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Competition. In 2017 she received her first Grammy Award nomination, for Best Jazz Vocal Album.
