Singer Roxana Amed is in the midst of a productive season. A native of Argentina, Roxana first found success in her home country as a singer-songwriter whose music blends South American folk traditions with art rock and modern jazz.
She moved from Buenos Aires to Miami in 2013 to teach at the Frost School of Music, and to explore new creative and professional opportunities, but the transition was more disruptive than she had imagined.
She says, “I thought I was not going to sing anymore. It seemed like a very wild shot to expect me to go back to producing music, to record music again, to travel again. I was really too worried about finding a place in this country, honoring the opportunity that this country and this community is giving me.”
That silence was broken in 2021 when she released her album Ontology - her first in the United States. The record dealt with her experience as an immigrant, and her divided identity.
Roxana explains, “Once you leave your homeland, once you leave that place that gave you your language, your habits, all that collection of things that build yourself, once you leave that you never belong again anywhere, not even to that place when you go back.”
Ontology was widely celebrated in her homeland (she made history as the first woman to win Argentina’s Premio Gardel prize in a jazz category), and it opened a path for her as an artist in the United States as well.
Since then, Roxana has kept a steady pace releasing four albums in as many years. Once the floodgates opened again, the music began to pour out of her. She compares that creative impulse to a kind of internal stampede of horses. She sings about that n her most recent release, Becoming Human which came out earlier this year, in the song “Those Horses Running in The Mist”.
Despite her commitment to writing and performing, Roxana is still very passionate about her teaching, something she attributes to her own, personal journey in becoming a jazz singer.
She says, “Teaching is my happy place. My students are always so surprised that I’m so happy teaching theory and all these horrible things for them and they say ‘why are you so happy teaching this’? I had to teach myself to sing this music because there was no one else, there were no schools back then when I was young. So you listened to the music from the recordings and started teaching yourself. And then I started sharing all those discoveries with other people. That’s why I think teaching became a passion.”
Roxana’s other great passion, performing, will take her to Dizzy’s Club in Jazz at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, August 20. And although she has been touring throughout Argentina and Europe recently, she says that playing in New York always holds something special for her.
She remarks, “With the audience, when you perform, when you are really relaxed you start reading their minds. And they start reading your mind. And you feel like you are saying a lot of things to each other that are not said. And this transmission of information from mind to mind is amazing in New York. That makes me address people with all this admiration for the city, for the audience, and the music that has been made there for years. How can’t you be inspired?”
