Music has always been a family affair for Durham jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon, a six-time Grammy Award nominee whose voice has been heard everywhere from the White House to the hit television series Mad Men. Born in Boston and raised in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, she grew up surrounded by sound.
"My father loved big band music, so in our home there was Count Basie and wonderful singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn," she recalls. "But there was also sacred music — my mother loved Mahalia Jackson — and also a lot of singing, a capella and blended voices."
Freelon attended graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill in the field of public health. She was later hired at the Durham County General Hospital, and although working in a business capacity, her love of people — and music — drew her to sing for patients in their rooms. After marrying and starting a family with Phil Freelon, now a renowned architect, she began entertaining the dream of becoming a jazz singer and wondering how she could pursue that career in Durham instead of a bigger city.
"Then I remembered something that my grandmother said to me that just resonated in my spirit: Bloom where you are planted," Freelon says. "That made me understand that you don't have to be in some other place to do what you were put on the planet to do. If you are destined to do that, you can do it wherever you are."
In the 1980s, Freelon took every advantage to learn and perform in her own backyard — from informal jam sessions in people's homes to a weekly slot at a local hotel. As a N.C. Arts Council Visiting Artist, she taught jazz vocal music at Brunswick Community College in Supply from 1989 to 1990. But it was the opportunity to showcase her singing at a 1990 conference held by the Southern Arts Federation (now South Arts) in Atlanta that provided her with a connection to musician Ellis Marsalis.
"He said, 'You sound pretty good,'" Freelon recalls, "which to me was very, very high praise. We stayed in touch, and that was the beginning of me reaching outside of the local pond." In 1992 she signed with Columbia records which released her debut CD, Nnenna Freelon.
Freelon has gone on to record or share the stage with opera superstar Jessye Norman, Herbie Hancock, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Take 6, Al Jarreau and the Count Basie Orchestra. She appeared in the musical Ask Your Mama, the feature film What Women Want and made a host of charity appearances including Jerry Lewis' Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon.
But home is where her heart is.
"Even now, some 20-plus years later, people will come up to me and say, 'I used to see you down at the Pyewacket Restaurant years and years ago,'" she says. "It's a warm feeling, because I never had to leave here to launch my career. I work all over the world in places like Japan, Brazil, France and Finland, and I'm proud and happy to say my adopted home is Durham, North Carolina."
Nnenna Freelon talks about her CD release Homefree in this series of videos.