Premiere: Jana Herzen On the Outside, looking inward

Singer/Songwriter/Label founder has Nothing But Love

Jana Herzen’s varied and colorful history infuses her writing. Raised by activist scientists, her early career as a theater artist led her to London and then to New York City, where she became a founding member for the award-winning and influential MCC Theater. After ten years with MCC, she traveled the world extensively, recorded her first album, and founded her Motéma record label.

Through the next 16 years, Herzen never lost sight of her journey as a singer, composer, and instrumentalist. Her deep immersion in diverse styles highlight the production and arrangements of her new album Nothing But Love, which drops January 17, 2020. With its unexpected juxtapositions of loss and melancholy alongside eye-winking fun and the courage let the sun back in, Nothing But Love offers a complex, sophisticated collection of folk/pop/world/jazz originals. Recorded live by a group of seasoned jazz musicians whose chemistry is palpable, each instrumentalist brings a special gift to the table, and Herzen’s own guitar work plays a key role in leading the arrangements.

Herzen’s rich, milky and confident vocals lead us through the album, and the driving rhythms and quirky lyrics of the standout track “On The Outside” ushers in the most quirky, wild and jam-based side of the album’s chameleon sound.

Herzen told Elmore, “I wrote ‘On the Outside’ in the last year of the 20th Century amidst some self-searching that happened also to be at the height of the Y2K scare. Remember that? Doomsday theories were going around about how the world’s infrastructure was going to collapse in the first second of the new Millenium due to faulty mainframe computer clocks. I happen to have been hanging out at the time with some punk visual artists on the San Francisco scene who were using some pretty wild imagery in their art. Some of those images wound up in this song, which illustrates, to a pretty rocking groove, the timeless truth that love, peace, and strength are really inside jobs. Thinking back, I believe it was a read through Viktor Frankl’s’ Man’s Search for Meaning’ which first brought this truth to my awareness.”

Nothing But Love marks over a decade of collaboration between Herzen and Charnett Moffett, acclaimed as one of the most innovative and virtuosic bassists in jazz. Herzen’s label, Motéma Music, has 20 Grammy nominations with four wins and has recorded new artists, legends and politically conscious groups.