After Working Behind the Scenes, Emerging Artist Now Spreads Her Wings

Roberta Brenza has long been a supporter of the arts, always a jazz fan who loved to sing, growing up in a household filled with the songs of Ella Fitzgerald and other vocalists from her father’s record collection.

While raising her two sons, Roberta spent two decades involved in volunteer work, including membership on nonprofit performing arts boards in Boulder, Colorado. All the while, she quietly nurtured a secret, long-held dream to make jazz a leading focus in her life. One of her first forays was organizing a private youth jazz combo for her then middle-school-aged sons. This inspired Roberta to enroll in a jazz combo class of her own and later, private lessons and workshops.

Roberta’s naturally adept ear, rich tone, and visceral feel for swing soon led to local gigs as well as private lessons with her first jazz mentor, Boulder-based pianist Art Lande. Additional training and inspiration came from a number of iconic female jazz mentors, including Sheila Jordan, Jay Clayton, Ellyn Rucker, Tina Phillips, Marguerite Juenemann, and Dawn Clement.

Roberta’s zeal and success behind the mic took her places on stage in the jazz world and also offered more opportunities to continue working on behalf of others from the wings. Her fluency in French led to volunteer work with the Haitian relief organization, the Haiti Medical Education Project. While in Cap-Haitian in 2016, she organized a concert with local musicians where she performed jazz standards as well as the Kreole folk song “Mesi Bondye (Merci Bon Dieu).”

Her knowledge of the broader cultural roots of jazz deepened when in 2017 she became the executive producer of New-York-based, Cuban pianist Elio Villafranca’s Grammy-nominated album, Cinque. The suite is a tribute to Joseph Cinque, the West African leader of the famous 1839 revolt of enslaved persons on the Spanish ship La Amistad. For this project, Roberta assisted Elio with background research that included traveling across the Haitian countryside to attend spiritual gatherings in order to observe and gain understanding of the role of Congolese elements in Haitian spiritual music.

Cinque features music honoring five Caribbean islands, which enabled Roberta to do a deep exploration of the African and Caribbean roots of jazz while absorbing the masterful performances by Elio, Wynton Marsalis, Lewis Nash, Steve Turre, and six other instrumentalists of the highest caliber. She also sang as part of a vocal chorus on Cinque.

Next Roberta headed to the West Village to further spread her wings in the spotlight of the world capital of jazz. She embarked upon a period of sitting in and listening, listening, listening in New York. The result is a singer refined organically, old school style, where you just got out there and tried to learn as much as you could from the masters. And the masters have been welcoming.

During these exuberant plunges into the New York scene, Roberta was on occasion accompanied by the late Roy Hargrove at Small’s and Harold Mabern at Smoke, as well as many other of New York’s great musicians. Getting heard at jams led to invitations to contribute her voice on the gigs of some of the world’s finest jazz artists, including Johnny O’Neal, Patience Higgins, Anthony Wonsey, and Jon Davis.

A CD project began to take root as a possibility. To Roberta’s enormous delight, highly respected drummer Matt Wilson joined as the producer. And so her debut release, It’s My Turn to Color Now, was recorded in June, 2019, with a stellar, largely New York-based band: producer Matt Wilson on drums, musical director Dawn Clement on piano and fender rhodes, Cameron Brown on bass, and Stacy Dillard on soprano and tenor sax. With masterful Mike Marciano of Systems Two at the recording helm, Roberta could not have asked for a more swinging, experienced, and supportive team.

A dream came true when her dear mentor of a number of years, National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master and vocalist Sheila Jordan, agreed to record with Roberta, an honor she treasures immensely. It was indeed Sheila who had years earlier been the inspiration that helped Roberta return to the mic after a two-year pause, a crash in confidence. It was seeing Sheila then at 89, still singing, teaching, and uplifting others, that solidified for Roberta that her own path—of making music the center after many years in the service of others—was invaluable to who she was to become as an artist. Life experience brings depth to any art form. Roberta also found inspiration in the career path of the fabulous René Marie who, like Roberta, had history in Colorado and had started her singing career in midlife. Roberta was in good company.

Roberta’s selections for this debut recording include two revealing originals and her personal spin on well-loved tunes, each having significance to her story. Her descriptions of each of the 12 tunes (and one spoken poem) are printed on the CD wallet.  

The title track, “It’s My Turn to Color Now,” describes her inner transition from parent to a newly independent woman pursuing her dreams, which she hopes will inspire others to do the same.

Roberta makes excellent use of her fluency in both French and Italian on the CD. “Les Feuilles Mortes (Autumn Leaves)” is sung in French with an original vocalese passage in English that elucidates the meaning of the original French lyric. Similarly, her fluency in Italian compelled Roberta to provide—as a poetic, spoken preface—a direct translation of the original lyric of “Estate” that she then sings in Italian as she has done at a number of concerts in Northern Italy, where she lived years ago.

Next up Roberta will be releasing a second album of standards selected in part in reflection on the era of COVID that began in 2020. This album was recorded in the spring of 2021 with the great Johnny O’Neal and his trio, including Mark Lewandowski on bass and Charles Goold on drums.

Roberta now lives in her native Chicago and enjoys creating visual art and Chicago’s vibrant jazz and storied creative music scene.