By the time I sat down for a chat with Meschiya Lake, in mid-October, I’d been keen to meet her for a long time—since 2019 at least. But our calendars didn’t line up for a while, then arranging a date sort of fell off my to-do list and it wasn’t until 2022 that I tried again. When I finally managed it, she was packing for a gig in Spain. The trip was a rare foray outside her adopted home of New Orleans, now that she’s mom to a young girl. And why go anywhere else, as someone who sings jazz—for she doesn’t call herself a jazz singer—when “the tour comes to you” (Meschiya’s words) in the form of 19 million music-hungry visitors a year?
I went into our long-awaited parlay expecting to talk music, but the conversation ended up being just as much about politics and the human experience. All are closely intertwined for Meschiya, who lectures on jazz and blues history as well as leading the critically acclaimed Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns. “For me, music has been mental health during very hard times,” she told me during our video chat. “It’s kept me going when I thought I couldn’t, because I’ve heard someone singing about the very same thing.” Her own singing career effectively began aged nine, when she won an open mic contest and bagged herself $500. It led to a regular gig at the South Dakota Opry, for which she was paid $25 per song.
But th
