In a 1957 interview, composer and artist Quincy Jones asked: “How many attitudes will be changed if jazz goes just where we want it to?”¹ Nearly sixty years later, his call would receive a response from Terrace Martin, who in describing his realization of the sacred collision between Blues, Jazz, and hip-hop to Downbeat recalled: “…I hear A Tribe Called Quest and I’m like, “Damn, this music feels like the music my father used to play in the back of the house…A Tribe Called Quest struck a chord because I’m digging it and find something [that makes me think], “What is this?” The song that made me play jazz music was “Sucka Nigga”…Reminded me of where I was from…” ²

What Martin identified as a teenager—and indeed, what A Tribe Called Quest reminded a new generation of music-makers in the 90s—is a sound that both preceded and exceeded the hold of historical time as we understand it. It’s what Amiri Baraka, in his ground-breaking work, Blues People, identified as a “blues continuum,” a rich plasma that held Black life and living together in both harmonious and dissonant ways, despite the centuries spent incarcerated on plantations far from the homelands that made them. This link is an elastic one, emerging in the South and making its way north to urban centers where it would undergo multiple mutative episodes—bending, stretching, and leaping—all without disturbing its shared spiritual and figural bedrock, Baraka’s “changing same.” Where Terrace Martin comes from is not only a particular place or region, but a people—a Blues People, a people constantly on the move when everything was moving against them. Every so often, that changing same of the Blues tradition punctuates popular culture in a way that launches me back into that continuum which restages the question of what happens when jazz goes just where we want it to.

Terrace Martin’s role over the last decade and a half as a hinge point between the Blues people that created him and the gloss of pop-R&B can only be understood by understanding where he is from. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Martin’s mother is a singer (and also purchased Martin’s first sampler when he was a pre-teen). His father is the late Ernest “Curly” Martin, a jazz drummer and Omaha Black Music Hall of Fame inductee. The Omaha connection bears emphasis, as one of many articulating nodes in the changing same of the Blues. After Reconstruction, Black people—called “exodusters”—looked to take advantage of the Homestead Act, and in1879 began settling in Western states like Nebraska. A few decades later, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Great Migration would see Black settlement in Omaha, consisting primarily of agricultural workers from the Mississippi-Tennessee corridor, the northernmost point of the Mississippi Delta region, the place that gave birth to the Blues.

This brings me to Summer Walker’s most recent album, Finally Over It, the last installation in her heartbreak triptych, which also includes Over It, and Still Not Over It. On this record, Martin’s jazz and Blues-minded fingerprints act as signposts for listeners who, like me, have always found themselves transfixed by Walker’s tenderness and unpunishable yearning. It is a tense, yielding, encounter between recent aesthetic moves in R&B and broader entanglements with jazz. At the center of this encounter are Martin’s arrangements which do not sit atop or hum beneath Walker's songs, but work as the connective tissue of her affective-sonic appearance. Walker’s devotion and connection to the lineages of blues, live instrumentation, and the mid-tempo R&B love/break-up song are threaded with Martin's production, which is an under-acknowledged part of the remaking of the sound of popular R&B, where anticipation and spontaneity, core ideas in jazz have made their re-entry.

Walker’s story is similar to Martin’s, yet altogether different at the same time. She was born in Atlanta to a mother who was a pastor, learning to play both guitar and piano by ear. Her debut album, Over It, came on the heels of her cult-favorite EP, Last Day of Summer, recorded and mixed by Walker herself who, at the time, was still cleaning homes and dancing to earn a living. The EP introduced her signature poetic voice; overflowing with heartbreak anthems and unabashed begging-pleading.

Because of her ability to walk a near-impossible tightrope between unbossed and down-bad, I have always felt that Walker is a Blues woman, and like any good Blues woman, she betrays that romantic love is seldom romantic, her anguish is foregrounded equally as “feelin good,” and she feels no need to disentangle love from suffering. Walker, with her guitar in hand (or perched behind a piano), brown liquor on her music stand, armed with a voice that sounds both wounded and biting, adorned by tattoos and a skin-tight dress, is a Blues woman. Listening to all three of her studio albums (plus EPs), one learns that Walker cannot be shamed out of laying bare her mistakes, cursing men out, begging for their devotion, or pleading for another chance. To a casual listener, Finally Over It is as straightforward as an R&B album gets. But there are moments where the “Blues” in R&B breaks through, and the continuum is made apparent. To echo Quincy Jones’ statement on Rahsaan Roland Kirk, you can only go “way out” when you start “with the basics—the blues…”

Finally Over It

The tension and yielding of Finally Over It is an extension of these earlier works and it is no coincidence that Terrace Martin’s participation in this project was not only contained to the tracks he produced, but also bled out into the general fabric of the album. The album is accompanied by a cover image of Summer Walker posed in a recreation of Anna-Nicole Smith’s infamous wedding to billionaire J. Howard Marshall. From the cover art alone, the listener is made aware that Walker’s view on love oscillates between pragmatic and sanguine. Her live show—equal parts cabaret and Magic City—begins with Walker dressed in a wedding gown, and ends at an altar mounted by the singer and her dancers. By the show’s conclusion, Walker is dressed in a different white dress, and the audience is no longer watching her at the end of an aisle. Instead, we find ourselves gathered around her altar in a circle, watching as she lays down each of her burdens. It is a subtle invitation into her spiritual and sacred practice as a child of Oshun. Walker has revealed on several occasions that the river goddess is her orisha, the deity who “holds her head” (or mediates consciousness), and is the deity of fecundity, abundance, and love. She is also a protector and guardian of children, and a healing presence—she can pour cooling water on a hot wound, and equally, she can bring forth the flood. On stage and on the record, is her child, Summer, calling together all the broken-hearted to witness her release.

Throughout the album, divided into Discs One and Two (For Better and For Worse, respectively), Walker wanders through the complex and often contradictory feelings required to finally get over it. Martin’s first contribution appears with “No,” an interpolative sample of Beyoncé’s fan favorite “Yes” from her debut solo album, Dangerously In Love. This is “dancing in the mirror” music, “I HATE my ex” music— the type of song that slides perfectly into a post-breakup playlist. In the background is a floating piano, in the foreground the beat slaps, and as Walker’s voice rings, “all I got for you is no, no, no,” suddenly, every Black millennial woman raised in the ’99 and 2000s is perched on the edge of her seat, smiling at the carefully smuggled in Destiny’s Child reference and thinking about the man that gave her the worst Blues of her life.

With the viral “Go Girl,” featuring Latto and Doja Cat, the gears switch. Martin’s next contribution opens with Walker’s languid, waterfall of an opening verse. Not only is Walker, as the only non-rapper on the track the most impressive with her rap skills, Martin’s ear and production decisions are perfectly measured. Featuring a heavy reverb reminiscent of the Martin-produced Kendrick Lamar’s soundscape, the track leaves a noticeable amount of empty space for all three women’s voices to linger and tease, threaded by Walker’s breathy mantra layered over the beat: “I’m in my Goyard, you go girl…”

Disc Two also opens with Martin as maestro, with the acoustic “FMT (F*ck My Type).” Walker is lamenting that she always picks the wrong men, singing with a folky sway and yodel flips as she cries “who the f*ck cares../f*ck my type,” and transporting the listener to heartbreak power ballads from the likes of Alanis Morissette.

It is not long before we realize that this acoustic sound is an intermezzo, with Martin ushering us into my personal favorite of the record, “Get Yo Boy.” Even though it does not have the traditional blues form, it is the bluesiest of the songs, because of its many thinly sliced layers of referentiality. It’s a tried-and-true theme. A man tries to steal his friend’s lady. But here Walker’s perspective as the cautious and sometimes taunting lady in question is foregrounded. The song samples Bobby Womack’s “I Wish He Didn’t Trust Me So Much,” with all of the R&B lore that abounds there. Those who know, know about Womack’s scandalous appearance at Sam Cooke’s funeral, hand-in-hand with his widow, less than one week after his tragic and mysterious murder. He was apparently dressed in one of Cooke’s suits, prompting Womack’s brothers to allegedly break his jaw. As Womack’s voice echoes in the background, Blues people all over are instantly clued in—is that a Bobby Womack sample for a song about a man trying to steal his friend’s girl? Walker’s slack-jawed crooning is intertwined with some of the most gorgeous background vocal layering you’ll hear in contemporary R&B. The scandalous theme of the song still isn’t enough to distract from this song’s most important revelation: Walker’s vocal technique. Womack’s falsetto floats behind 21 Savage’s staccato, and as the song fades out, Walker sings, “alone with his wife…” You better get your boy (before he gets your girl).

Martin also lends his ear to the closing number of the record, “Finally Over it,” which features a harp, with a maudlin string section that is reminiscent of a wedding dirge, but with a despondence that Walker expresses so lucidly. There’s an ache in Walker’s voice that betrays the apparent optimism of the lyrics. She closes the album in a way that is irresolute. It is equal parts hopeful and desperate, and rife with worry. An album that began with “no, no, no…” closes with Walker singing “I do, I do, I do.” A full circle. Whatever optimism is apparent is haunted by the specter of the album’s cover art, inspired by a woman who found herself widowed and penniless shortly after saying “I do.” Has Walker found love, or has she found the opening to her next heartbreak and possible demise?

In the end, Martin and Walker both carry forward a core pillar of the Blues tradition—that there are no final answers, only puzzles. And a knowledge that you’d better have some comfortable shoes in case you need to move on and get over it. Like Billie Holiday—the high priestess of Blues Women—declared in an interview shortly before her passing, “I hold no regrets and I carry no shame…If my life was wrong or right—good or bad—it’s still my life and what’s about to happen—will happen just to me….[And] when I leave this lump they call the world, I’m going to leave all my blues behind and walk off singing.”

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