MARY ELLEN MARK
MADELEINE PEYROUX
Whether on the streets of Paris’ Latin Quarter or on the most august stages in the world, Madeleine Peyroux creates a beautiful moment with listeners.
In a recent interview, the jazz and blues singer said “there’s an incredible beauty to communing with music, especially when it’s organic like that in the street.”
Peyroux comes to The New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Nov. 13 — she and Catherine Russell will appear as “special guests” with Gregory Porter — more than 30 years after passing the hat on Parisian street corners as a teenager.
Music, Peyroux says, has always been an emotional sanctuary for her. While she didn’t dream of a musical career, as a young girl she played ukulele with her mother, singing old jazz and movie tunes at home.
“Music was healing,” she says. “My home life was was pretty unpleasant. My father was a violent drunk, and my mother was codependent in her own way. And there were really very few times where everything was OK … When my mother and I sat down and played music together, my father just — no matter what mental or physical state he was in — he would just shut up. He would just stop, whatever it was, and listen. And I think that’s what got me fired up.”
She recalled that she fell in love with the beautiful chords she heard in old jazz and blue songs and when her family moved to Paris from The United States, she looked for street musicians who were playing the music that enraptured her. Having taken up the guitar, she began to play on the streets as well, learning from older street musicians.
“I was also, frankly, inspired by the idea that somebody would listen to what I had to say,” she says. “Because I did grow up in a home where I needed to ask for help from like, ‘Hey, this (stuff) is going down over here. There’s violence in this home. I need help.’ And when you’re a kid, any way you can reach out to the outside world to be heard is like the answer to everything.
“I never expected music to become a career. I think it was just keeping me alive, and keeping me sane and functioning and moving from A to B.”
The cover of Madeleine Peyroux’s “Careless Love” album.
She was offered a major-label record contract just as she left her teen years. In 1996, at 22, she released Dreamland, her languorous take on old jazz and blues tunes. The album brought her a larger international audience, with critics noting her voice’s resemblance to Billie Holiday’s. In 2004, her album Careless Love went gold. Over the years, she has collaborated with a variety of top musicians, including Allen Toussaint, k.d. lang, Meshell Ndegeocello and Steely Dan’s Walter Becker.
She has increasingly written her own songs. Her most recent album, 2024’s Let’s Walk (2024) was all originals, reflecting in part her increased interest in speaking out for social justice.
For the NJPAC show, Peyroux will focus on familiar American songs. “The theme of the show … don’t call it ‘American Songbook,’ but it’s the idea of what is American music, and there are songs that most Americans recognize immediately, even though we don’t think of them as ‘Songbook,’ ” she says. “We recognize them from other areas — movies, or records, or rock ‘n’ roll — different eras of American music.”
Notably, she said, they are written by songwriters who were from America’s various immigrant communities.
She will also sing duets with Russell, covering songs of Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” who started her musical career busking on the streets of Chattanooga.
“Bessie Smith was such an incredible overachiever,” Peyroux says. “There are generations of people who have covered her songs, and so much so that we don’t even realize that she was the first one doing a lot of this stuff.”
EBRU YILDIZ
MADELEINE PEYROUX
Peyroux compared her recent run at Manhattan’s tony Café Carlyle to her busking days, saying it was the same fundamental process.“When you’re on the street, you’re looking for the quietest place,” she says. “You want to be in a place where there’s light so that you can be seen, and you want to create a moment together.”
She says a good performing space removes the distractions of the street, so “the rest of the goal is just to go forward with concentrating on what you were doing outside, which is focus … It wasn’t just me focusing my energy, my intention, my emotions on a note, on a feeling, on a story … I was also focusing everyone else. I was coaxing them to focus.
“It’s like a whirlpool. It’s like you gather this one, and then you come over here, and you gather that one, and hopefully as we go forward, it speeds up. It gets intense. We’re all in the same place together, and we move through something. I guess the water goes … I don’t know where it goes. Sometimes it comes out your eyes because there’s a lot of crying, but I think it’s great.”
Madeleine Peyroux will perform with Gregory Porter and Catherine Russell at Prudential Hall at NJPAC in Newark, Nov. 13 at 8 p.m., as part of The TD James Moody Jazz Festival. Visit ticketmaster.com.
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