Sometimes, the only way to become yourself is to go somewhere no one knows who you are. For guitarist and singer Dida Pelled, that place was New York.
She grew up in Tel Aviv. She was listening to pop music until an influential music teacher in high school turned her on to jazz.
“An amazing teacher taught jazz history,” she remembers. “He was the coolest teacher. He was our friend and he made us fall in love with the music [so] that all I cared about from 15 to 18 was Grant Green, Hank Mobley, like bebop and hard bop, Erroll Garner, Kenny Dorham.”
But there were other parts of her life that hadn’t quite found their way out yet, like singing. “I was very shy about it but that was my biggest passion: to sing,” she says.
“Only when I moved to New York, I started feeling more confident to sing at places. [....] When you're in a new place, no one knows me.”
That kind of thinking ultimately extended beyond her voice to her whole sense of identity, style, even sexuality. She explains, “I think I needed a new environment to explore other things I wanted to do and let these options become options.”
Today, Dida Pelled’s music reflects that kind of openness. She moves easily between styles, jazz, blues, americana, indie rock. But underneath all of it, there’s a through line and a sense that whatever she’s doing it has to feel like now.
“It has to feel like it's now. Otherwise it doesn't speak to me at all. I'm not trying to be nostalgic. I don't like when people use this word with me. If the songs don't feel relevant right now, it doesn't mean anything to me,” she says.
That’s true even when she’s singing old songs. On her recent album I Wish You Would - which features bassist Tony Scherr, drummer Kenny Wollesen, and pianist Sullivan Fortner - she interprets blues material that, in many cases, was written and performed in another era, often from a male perspective.
She doesn’t rewrite the songs so much as she inhabits them, shifts them and brings them into her life. Sometimes that means changing a place name. Sometimes it means changing a point of view. And sometimes it just means singing the lyric as it is and letting the meaning change because of who’s singing it.
When it comes to her visual presentation, Dida takes photos and makes videos that don’t look like what you might expect from a jazz musician. For example, the cover of her new album features her black leather boot resting on the naked backside of her wife.
As she told me: “I think I like being the person who is not doing what is expected…If people feel a little uncomfortable it’s good.”
You can hear my full conversation with Dida Pelled on The Third Story.
