Alice Zawadzki’s Turning Point: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

There are so many albums – but the first one that came to mind was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and I’ve decided to stick with that. I was 13 when I heard it. I shared a room with my older sister Meg, who was into soul and hip-hop and jazz, and she got it. She’d bought it in Woolworths in Abingdon town centre, I think. She had a CD player in the room, and she listened to it non-stop. From about the age of nine, I’d just wanted to be like her, which used to drive her mad. But we get on brilliantly now – and this record was what we bonded over! So it has that going for it too…

It was my regular listening from 13-18, and I’ve dipped back into it ever since. It’s one of those amazing albums that has so many layers to it – you can just keep discovering more. That’s not just musically, but socially as well – there are a million issues that you get hip to. The record has so much heart. Lauryn was 22 when she made it, and she was pregnant with her first child. You can hear a kind of trepidation, and so much soulfulness. The big theme of the album is navigating the journey of girlhood into womanhood. You might wonder why a hip-hop album coming out of New Jersey would resonate with a white girl from Oxfordshire? I think it’s because the themes that she was dealing with are so universal, but also more pronounced when you’re a black American female. So if there’s anything you need to know as a young woman growing up, she will know it. Listening to her lyrics is like a listening to a big sister. Also, in hip-hop, you are told issues very explicitly - things about about getting in trouble, about boys and so on. Where I was growing up, you would not find those things talked about explicitly anywhere else.

That genre that made a big impact on me. I had been listening to things like Mariah Carey and Destiny’s Child – that big virtuosic thing of really great pop singers. When I first heard Lauryn Hill, there was that aspect too – all of the soulful singing she does is amazing – but also it was a whole new world of groove. I remember thinking, “Wow – this is like nothing I’ve heard before”. It switches you on to a sound that’s in the body, not just up in your head.

I did know about jazz before I heard this record, in fact. When I was 12, the great New Orleans singer Lillian Boutté came to my school to give a workshop. It was the first time I’d heard jazz that wasn’t on a TV advert! I heard her and fell in love – I couldn’t believe the freedom of the music. I had been involved in some amazing music education things by then – choirs and orchestras and things. I was really into it, but it had a formality and an etiquette that was quite rigid. You learn the ropes and go along with it. Of course there’s etiquette in jazz as well - but it included the whole room, and there was so much joy in that room when Lillian sang. I thought, “I wanna be involved in that!” She took me under her wing, and I ended up going on tour with her as a backing singer when I was in my teens. I learned through osmosis, by observing how she did things. I’m really grateful to her for letting me do that. And going back to Lauryn Hill – her life and Lillian’s life would have been really different; but there’s the unifying factor of being a black American woman. It’s the frame of reference.

It starts your brain working about the black American experience and where jazz comes from, what experience gave birth to jazz. Because that album wouldn’t exist without jazz – you can recognise the lineage. So for someone from my demographic, the more you can understand the tradition of the scene you’re in, the better. When I look back now, I’m glad to have listened so intently to that stuff – because it formed the bedrock of the way I sing today. It’s not direct usage or imitation any more – though it probably was when I was 20! But it’s there….

Alice Zawadzki’s most recent album Within You Is A World of Spring is released on Whirlwind Recordings