JARROD LAWSON (Sun, 3/15/26)

It was in late 2022 that Jarrod Lawson had the biggest and most unexpected thrill of his music career.  He had just received a glowing endorsement in print from Michelle Obama, who was asked by Entertainment Weekly who she was listening to and, after mentioning Beyonce’s Renaissance album, added “There’s this young jazz, blue-eyed soul kid Jarrod Lawson that I’m loving….”

At the time, Jarrod, who had relocated to Nashville from his long-time base in Portland, was receiving major airplay in the US and in Europe on his remake of the Isley Brothers’ Seventies classic “Footsteps In The Dark”, which followed his 2020 sophomore album “Be The Change”.

That album, released six years after his self-titled debut, made its mark immediately, with entries at #1 on Amazon’s Jazz Albums chart and at #2 on Billboard magazine’s Contemporary Jazz Albums chart.

For singer/songwriter/keyboard player Lawson, who had previously worked as a stone mason and piano tuner, the appreciation of his music in his native US was particularly gratifying, since his breakthrough in 2014 had been primarily in Europe, where in a whirlwind couple of years he played festival, club and concert dates in 15 countries, including the North Sea Jazz Festival, London Jazz Festival and the world renowned Ronnie Scott’s Club, as well as powering his way into the Dutch Top 40 Albums chart.

He has since performed around the world in Tokyo, Beijing, Melbourne, and at Indonesia’s Java Jazz festival.   In the US, he has played many of the leading jazz venues from New York to Seattle.

The “Be The Change” album saw Lawson accompanied by a talented band that benefited from the rhythmic presence of Grammy-nominated percussionist Sammy Figueroa.        

The album is a beautiful, restrained, dreamy mix of love songs, irrelevance, and social commentary.    Describing the album as “a masterpiece”, SoulTracks.com hailed the title track as “an instant classic that would have fit just as comfortably in 1970 as it does in 2020”.     

Lawson’s trademark layered harmonies and vocal phrasing, his jazz fusion arrangements, and his stunning keyboard skills are in evidence throughout, notably on the title track “Be The Change”, “Universal Chord”, and “How Long”.  On the intimate “I’ll Be Your Radio,” he was joined by Amber Navran and her fellow members of Los Angeles alternative R&B trio Moonchild.  One critic described it as “a match made in harmony heaven”.

And now in 2024, Lawson has come up with an exciting new collaboration with fast-rising Los Angeles vocalist Raquel Rodriguez, on a beautiful retro soul jam “Next Move”. The track had its origins in a two-day recording/writing session that he had with Rodriguez and Sam Brawner at their Blue Dream Studios in 2018.   Andris Mattson from Moonchild was also in town and joined in the session.  

Nothing from that session found its way onto record right away, but Jarrod says, “the bones of the track which eventually became ‘Next Move’ haunted me above and beyond the others, and while starting to work on my third album, I decided to resuscitate that rough idea.  So we got to work, refining and shaping the song, and voila, six years later, ‘Next Move’ became a thing”.