Thank You Hot House Jazz!

Thrilled to be featured in the March 2024 Women’s Issue at Hot House Jazz.

Hot House Jazz

2024 Women’s Issue

NIOKA WORKMAN

ADVENT OF THE FIERY SISTAHOOD! By Raul da Gama

THE GREAT ANTHROPOLOGIST

Margaret Mead may have unwittingly pre-empted the advent of sisterhood when she examined a human skeleton and observed a femur that had been broken and then healed. She theorized that some- one in that early community had bound the wound, carried the person to safety, and taken time to stay with the injured, tend- ing to the person through recovery.

Was that person a woman? Did the pre- historic rest-and-recovery stopover of that early caravansary help turn the human mind to a prehistoric muse — and the for- mation of a caring Sistahood? Indeed, the pictograms in Somaliland and Clovis in those remarkable, immutable cave-muse- ums tell intriguing stories.

A narrative even more thrilling and ornamental is alive today in the Fiery Sistahood begotten of jazz griot Nioka Workman and her art. For she is the first Fiery Sista with an uncommon eye for the real, the unreal, and the ephemeral of humanity’s sisters. As she posits, from the place in which her art springs, “There is sunshine in every corner of the beauty of life, and the woman is at its center.”

Nioka uses a cello, bowing as an artist with a brush, painting phrases made of notes that leap and twirl and pirouette in magical ellipses to tell her modern-day sto- ries of sisterhood. It is such a memorable thrill to behold Nioka’s music with the mind’s eye, in the inner ear, as she whips out such ribbons of melody, harmony and rhythm — playing pizzicato or con arco, elongating notes in her sonic universe with gleaming finger vibrato.

But who knew the cello — this diaboli- cally hard-to-play instrument — would carry Nioka to the rarefied realm of the music? Certainly, her inspirational mum, Elaine, and dad knew. “There was a cello somewhere in the room of my dad’s base- ment,” she says with a sunlight-bright laugh. Dad is, of course, the iconic contra- bassist Reggie Workman whose bass adorns music today, just as it did the music of legendary musicians from John Coltrane to Freddie Hubbard and many more. “I told him I would like to try that instrument, and he and my mum gave me their bless- ings,” she recalls.

So here she is — this supreme sista at the peak of her artistry. Nioka joins stars such as Oscar Pettiford, Harry “The Bear” Babasin, and Abdul Wadud. Yet, it is together with the “sainted sistas of the cello” ………..

Follow this article in the March 2024 Hot House Jazz Women’s Issue, NIOKA WORKMAN/ADVENT OF THE FIERY SISTAHOOD! By Raul da Gama.