The Day Moby Called
“I’d given myself over to working for a living, working a standard straight job,” singer and Flatbush native Inyang Bassey told me recently, “And I honestly knew in my mind it was definitely going be the last place I was going to work.”
That job was with Carnegie Hall, where Bassey found herself as a coordinator in 2009 for the organization’s free Neighborhood Concert Series. “I was completely ecstatic to be there,” she said, sitting on a hill overlooking Brooklyn’s Botanical Gardens. “But inside I knew I was a musician. I also knew that there are millions of people that want to do this, but you need to have a job.”
And an unfulfilled wish, apparently.
Hearing Bassey articulate her past year, one gets the feeling that she’s less diamond-in-the-Brooklyn-rough and more tortoise-to-the-hare, as the Columbia grad admits to years spent rediscovering a dormant voice and a music community that would listen.
Bassey’s retelling of the call she took from Moby on her birthday last August and the month of intense touring that followed is nothing short of good old fashioned timing. After years of false starts and spammed emails, the singer was given two rehearsals and a serious trial by fire over forty dates and radio spots. “It was incredible,” she said of the US tour. “It made me realize that this truly is where I belong, and that’s where the real epiphany took place was on the road.”
“Part of the reason it took me so long to have a relationship with my voice is that it used to freak me out,” she admits. “Because I was only doing it in my apartment by myself. And it was so big. There was so much emotion in it. It was bigger than what I wanted to deal with so I just wouldn’t sing.”
Yet it was precisely the nightly grind and Moby’s “outrageously deep” repertoire that included soul, gospel, even negro spirituals that suited Bassey's range and eventually gave both body and voice the green light. “I’ve never been on a stage where it was big enough for me to really move around,” she said, laughing, remembering the first time Moby gestured to her from behind the mic. “He just went like this and it was on. I was like an animal.”
As for those untrained pipes, Bassey is still working through what most professional singers face when put to the very physical test. “I’m discovering [it] right now,” she says. “My voice before the tour is completely different from my voice after the tour and the [PBS Soundstage taping] was different from the tour because there were a couple months in there.”
In another instance of healthy timing and “guardian angel” friends stepping up to make precious introductions, Bassey is currently trusting that voice with one of Brooklyn’s finest songwriters working today: Binky Griptite of Daptone Records. Griptite, a prolific musician and arranger in his own right, is the leader of Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. “It’s sort of in a germinal phase at this point, but we’ve already recorded a bunch of stuff on an album he intends to release,” she says of the early collaborations that have included her own material.
A large part of Bassey’s responsibility at Carnegie Hall was producing performances with a close group of friends and collaborators for neighborhoods across the city. It wasn’t until the end when she found herself stopping to think, “wait a minute, I’m one of them," she says of the artists. "I really should be doing that.”
It’s also not lost on the singer that community and collaboration hold the keys to establishing her voice as anything more than a tool for bedroom demos or drunken serenades. “When I didn’t have a community it just didn’t feel worthwhile somehow and once I started working with people who have a love for music it’s just a whole different world. To know it can be a loving experience all around, there’s nothing better.”
That said, it’s only fitting to hear the singer finding her voice in a sea of unfamiliar faces, including a recent guest spot at the Dig Deeper music series that reportedly blew the doors off Southpaw. “It was only when I could share it that I was really able to enjoy [it],” she said, of singing on a schedule for the first time in her career, with such creative encouragement. “I saw that it brought joy and excitement and sunshine to people. It wasn’t just me making a big sound all by myself kind of thing.”
“I started singing when I started performing and then my writing really shifted because it wasn’t all about me anymore,” she notes, summing up both her studio time with Binky and the nightly circus with Moby. “It was about communicating something as opposed to excavating my own internal world.”
We're just glad she picked up the phone.
Inyang Bassey will perform with Moby this Saturday, June 5, 2010 at Bar4 to celebrate the launch of BrooklynTheBorough.com's Brooklyn Beats local music coverage. No air date for her PBS Soundstage performance had been announced at press time.
