When Lakecia Benjamin was a senior at LaGuardia High School, she got a phone call from the late trumpet master Clark Terry.
Lakecia was only a few years into playing jazz saxophone, but already she had piqued the interest of the octogenarian legend. Terry, for his part, was known as one of the great mentors in jazz. Countless musicians have stories that begin with an unexpected phone call from Clark Terry. His relationship with the young pianist Justin Kauflin was even documented in the 2014 film Keep On Keepin' On.
Lakecia had actually decided to pursue jazz in earnest after hearing Clark Terry solo on a Duke Ellington record. So when the voice on the other end of the phone announced itself as Clark Terry, she did the only sensible thing she could think to do.
She hung up.
It just seemed too implausible.
Fortunately, he called back.
The conversation that followed opened a door that would help shape the rest of her life.
After an early stint in Clark Terry's Young Titans of Jazz band, Lakecia went on to work with an extraordinarily wide range of artists, from the Count Basie Orchestra and Harry Belafonte to Stevie Wonder, Prince and Kool & the Gang. Her musical world is expansive, encompassing jazz, funk, hip-hop, and R&B.
Today, Lakecia is one of the most dynamic voices in jazz: an exciting live performer whose music bridges showmanship and depth.
After having put in years working with bigger name artists and leaning into a more funk oriented sound, in 2020, she released Pursuance: The Coltranes, a project honoring John and Alice Coltrane as parallel creative forces. It was a turning point for Lakecia, and it reconnected her music to lineage, spirituality, and a deeper sense of purpose.
She followed it with Phoenix, recorded after surviving a near-fatal car accident, and later Phoenix Reimagined, a live companion album. Together, those projects earned multiple Grammy nominations, and expanded her wider audience.
Her most recent album, We Dream, is in many ways the culmination of her journey so far. It brings together jazz, hip-hop, R&B and spoken word, and features collaborators ranging from Terence Blanchard, Chief Adjuah and Chris Potter to Black Thought, Bilal, Hiromi and Kassa Overall. She refers to them as her own “little group of avengers”.
She sees We Dream in cinematic terms. “I think about the album starting with me rising out of the ashes, the last of humanity. And as you keep going through the record, I think about each guest as stopping in a different place, a different location.”
Lakecia holds the line between the old school and the new: the tradition of mentorship she inherited from musicians like Clark Terry, and a musical outlook that remains completely open to whatever comes next.
Here she talks about her first professional experiences, and how the mentors, heroes, setbacks and aspirations that shaped her story continue to inform her today.
Watch the conversation on youtube here
