Recently, a gifted young singer started sharing videos of herself singing along with some of the most celebrated jazz recordings of all time on Instagram. These included John Coltrane’s solo on “Giant Steps,” Sonny Rollins’ solo on “St. Thomas,” Miles Davis’s solo on “So What”. Clearly this singer has great taste, I thought.
Before long, she was generating hundreds of thousands of views and encouragement from a who’s who of musicians. Then she started her own YouTube talk show, Branching Out with Blossom, discussing the blues with pianist Isaiah J. Thompson, songwriting with Nicole Zuraitis, and groove with Christian McBride.
The singer in question goes by Blossom Dearly, not to be confused with the late, great Blossom Dearie. And she is… unusual. One might be forgiven for assuming that Blossom is a puppet, based on her look.
But as Blossom explained in a recent call, she is, in fact, a cherry blossom who has come to life, born out of whole cloth and raised in New York’s Central Park.
As Blossom tells it, she started posting videos almost on a whim. Then one day, while she was having lunch in a cafe, her version of Lee Morgan’s trumpet solo from Art Blakey’s “Moanin’” suddenly took off.
She says “I remember seeing some very big names coming up on my notifications. And I remember thinking, ‘What’s this? Oh, my goodness. What’s happening? What’s happening?’”
Part of Blossom’s appeal is the positivity and sheer enthusiasm she spreads about music. She may be a bit childlike, but she’s also a serious student of jazz. Ask her how she learns difficult solos and she’ll tell you her most important technique is “repetition”: doing something over and over again, even when it sounds bad at first.
And she says the joy she puts out into the world has been returned by her online community, whose members she calls her “petals.”
“It’s nice to be nice to people, and if you put out art with good intentions, I think good things can happen,” she explains.
Blossom encourages her petals to celebrate singing and swinging. She even coaxed a short performance out of me. And as I attempted to remember Jon Hendricks’s lyrics to “Little Pony,” she offered some encouragement.
She nudged me: “That’s okay. If it sounds bad at first, that’s the point. [...]And that sounded very bad, so that’s good.”
But for all the lightheartedness Blossom brings to a troubled world, she’s also a serious student of jazz and its history. And when I asked her why the music still matters, her answer was surprisingly thoughtful.
She tells me, “I think jazz music helps society understand itself because jazz musicians put themselves in their music. So the more that people put themselves in their music and they tell their stories, it’s like writing history, right? And jazz music is so important to American history. You can actually learn so, so, so, so, so much about American history through the music. I would even say that jazz is American history.”
This week, Blossom is branching out again, performing live for the first time with her band, The Shrub-Tones (a nod to Freddie Hubbard’s Hub-Tones record).
Blossom Dearly and the Shrub-Tones perform October 7 at 7:30 in the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center.
And when Blossom arrives, nobody… leaves.
You can watch my full conversation with Blossom HERE:
