The Walk of Soul

It’s a 75-year-strong tradition, Amateur Night at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre. Every Wednesday since 1934, acts have taken the stage to either catch their big break by winning the weekly talent show—or get booed off the stage by a tough crowd. Well, add local singer Emily Braden to the lattercategory.

“I was an outsider in a couple ways. I’m not a local girl and I’m not black and I was doing jazz,” she says of her Apollo performance in March. But she still describes the gig as “amazing.” “When the tap dancer came for me, I was thinking, ‘This is life. I’m really living my life right now.’”

To add insult to injury, she was booted out the back door of the theatre after being booed, as she didn’t have a ticket to get back in. It wasn’t all bad, though; after all, folks like Lauryn Hill and Dave Chapelle suffered the same fate, and she spent the rest of her night singing with an organ trio at the Lenox Lounge—and had a gig at the Iridium days later. “If I get booed in a real spot in Harlem, then I’ll start to worry,” she says.

Indeed, Braden seems to be a woman who takes it all in stride. After all, she’s only just releasing her debut album, Soul Walk, at JazzFest (8 p.m. Tuesday at Alix Goolden), despite having a long-standing local reputation as a vocal powerhouse.

“I’m of that mind of, ‘Wait until you have something to say before you say it.’ Mostly, I was doing school up until about a year ago,” she says (she recently completed her Masters in Hispanic studies). “In that time, I was really schooling myself with jazz standards and just doing as much live performing as I could. I only started writing original music in the last year.”

The album was worth the wait. The 12-song collection, of which about half are originals, was recorded during one of Braden’s many stints in NYC. She worked with pianist/composer Misha Piatigorsky—who spends his summers in Victoria and will be playing with Braden at the CD release—to create an eclectic collection of what she describes as “either high-energy jazz rooted in soul or high-energy soul rooted in jazz.”

Deciding to record in her second home in New York—she’s been billing herself as a “bi-coastal artist”—wasn’t one she came by easily.

“I debated that because there are so many musicians here that I’ve been working with and I could make a killer recording here, I know that I could,” Braden says. “Part of it was for that experience. I just wanted to be hearing what was going on there. I’ve always been a big-city girl at heart and living in Harlem and going around and playing at jam sessions was really inspiring.”

I’m happy to report that the resulting album is, too.