Now playing across Canada, France, Switzerland, Argentina and Brazil, Grateful is Dr. Naila Keleta-Mae's fourth full-length album. Produced just outside of Montreal, a city to which Keleta-Mae has deep creative ties, the ten-track album is an extension of her research-creation project Black And Free which explores themes of Blackness and freedom in the 21st century through Black expressive culture.
Connecting with music
As a multidisciplinary artist, Keleta-Mae is always excited to explore new projects and mediums, but she finds herself consistently drawn back to music. "I finish an album and then I start thinking about making another one," says the Communication Arts professor and Canada Research Chair in Race, Gender and Performance. "It's not necessarily that songs come, but that the idea of creating in song comes to me - and it's a form of art-making that captures my attention and imagination in specific ways."
It's partly the challenge of writing song lyrics along with a melody, she says, and partly a sense of connection with traditions of Black music. "These traditions are deeply rooted in an ethos of activism, of community engagement, of doing scholarship and art and culture in service of larger questions of liberation and equality," she says. "They've informed my career, and my life as an artist, scholar and person."
Existing in the hyphen
The relationship between art and her research predates and is at the heart of the Black And Free project. Years ago, Keleta-Mae partnered with Dr. Helene Vosters on a workshop where they talked about being "artists hyphen scholars," exploring what it means to exist in the space between art and scholarship.
"In many ways, that's what I've been doing since I started graduate school in 2003," she says. "The hyphen for me has been central because the research work, that traditional deep study, absolutely informs every play, every song, every bricolage, everything that I make. It's alive there."
In her song "I Know," she affirms "I know what it is to be a woman; I know what it is to be a girl. We can refuse and we can choose to be who we came to be and do what we came to do." For Keleta-Mae, that's what it means to exist in the hyphen - to bring research to life, to explore aspects of feminisms in art "while holding it in a moment and offering a solution, a refusal, a choice, offering something else."
Offering solutions
Keleta-Mae considers Grateful her most meditative album. The record is rooted in her desire to speak to the complexities of what's happening in the world while also offering a hope grounded in that reality. "I've got albums and work that speak a lot to the pain," she says, "and so I was interested in thinking through what it means not to bleed on the canvas, as Zak Ové says, but to offer solutions."
This philosophy is perhaps best expressed in the title song, which offers at once a meditation and an insistence on action: "I am grateful for today, so very grateful for today. I will be grateful for today no matter what comes in my way."
Gratitude, for Keleta-Mae, comes with an acknowledgement that you must also do your part. "That's what that song is about. That's what the album is about for me," she says. "How do I make music and be part of those traditions and those artists who are out there, who are trying to speak to the moment, who are trying to be engaged, who are trying to imagine with other people how else we can be on this planet together?"
Grateful was released on August 8. Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or wherever you stream your music.
