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Not Every Singer Is Here to Start the Party
Jazz chanteuse Risa Branch on animal-rights activism, switching genres, and the healing power of music
“I don’t know any jazz singers apart from you,” I tell Risa Branch as we peruse the dinner menu at Farmacy Kitchen, a pop-up vegan restaurant in SoHo. “You’re a kind of time traveler.” She may look like a 21st-century New Yorker — hair in long locs, an intricate silver ring running the length of her index finger, the chill-and-steady presence of someone who meditates every morning — but when Risa opens her mouth to sing, you get why fans would liken her to an “old-school jazz singer from the ’30s” even when she was performing electro-soul on the Vancouver indie scene five and ten years ago. Farmacy is a British company testing the New York City market (through February 2020), but the fern-colored velveteen cushions, ivied wallpaper, and dividers teeming with palm fronds are a fitting backdrop for a conversation about the greenest city either of us have ever seen. Risa moved back to the States four years ago to be a little closer to her family in Texas, but she still misses Vancouver.
Risa orders the truffle mac ’n cheese, and I go for the Mexican bowl with sprouted coriander rice and some pretty excellent guac. “I was the kind of kid who’d come out to the living room with my best friend and we’d say, ‘We have a show for you!’, and we’d do a song-and-dance number,” she tells me. From the age of ten or eleven she vividly remembers listening to Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nina Simone. After performing in gospel choirs from grade school through undergrad, she began a collaboration with electronic artist Obediya Wonderful that would yield R and Be, her 2011 debut album. A friend in Vancouver connected Risa with a local jazz band—leading her back to her childhood favorites—and she’d occasionally “jazzify” some of the electro-soul tracks co-written with Obediya, too. Her 2014 Kickstarter campaign raised more than $6,000, which Risa used to hire Vancouver jazz linchpin Cory Weeds for her session producer along with a full band to record her debut jazz album, I Thought About You, which dropped this past April.
