Southern Avenue -The journey of a Family Band
By Matteo Bossi
Just by looking at the front cover of “Family”, the new Southern Avenue album, out now on Alligator, it is evident that this band is something different. The picture portrays three sisters, Tierinii, Tikyra(TK)and Ava Jackson and Ori Naftaly, the guitar player who is married to Tierinii and it manages to convey their joyful and fresh approach to music, combining blues, soul and rhythm and blues in very personal recipe. “We feel like this is a debut album, it’s a continuation for sure, but we feel great about it, it’s definitely the most us we’ve ever been”. Says Ori Naftaly at the beginning of our conversation. “Family” really seems like a concept album from the first song “Long Is The Road”, to the last, “We Are”. “It was very intentional”, adds Tierinii Jackson, the lead singer, sitting beside Naftaly, “we did create a concept album, we wanted to acknowledge the journey and the relationships that we built within the band and also with the community of fans that we acquired along the way. You got it, and that’s a good thing!”
Ori Naftaly: “We really had an epiphany of what we want to do next, which was back to the roots, back to the basics, write songs with guitar and vocals on a phone voice memo, finish the song and move on to the next. In the past we did write in different ways, you know, sometimes it can be a drum beat, sometimes a lyric…but here we only worked on what the band will do later on and focus on having the song work with just guitar and vocals. That was how we wrote the album and we did it chronologically so Long Is The Road is the story of how I came to America and what happened to me with my ex and how basically I didn’t give up. Then Upside is the resolution of that, staying optimistic. Found A Friend In You is about us meeting each other and then the middle is about those early years, Rum Boogie…and Sisters and We Are, is where it ends. When Ava joined us full time, three years ago. That’s where the story of the album ends. It’s not just that Tierinii and I are a couple and having Tikyra, that’s enough but having Ava joining really made it into a family thing.”
Tierinii Jackson: Also onstage and offstage it takes the whole family, all the sisters pitch in to make this thing work, my mother and my older sisters are at home helping out with the older kids and so it’s a big machine. So the song Sister the first verse speaks about my sisters onstage, but the second verse talks about my sisters at home. At some point we realized that for Souther Avenue it takes the whole family to makes this thing work.
Ori: And the transition that you hear on the album, the shorts snippets…John Burk, our producer, really wanted us to make them into full songs, but we insisted, it was not hard, he got it, that we really wanted to have little things to set the tone and to connect the songs. And w wanted it to be musical. Not necessarily some chords but a small song that tells the next part happening…
Some of those snippets, like “Family” or “Kept On Moving On”, have a gospel feel and maybe it is a reminder that you Tierinii and your sisters grew up in church.
Tierinii: Yes, we grew up in the church and every bit of blues that we knew was from the church, it had gospel lyrics on it, but that’s our core. Who we are.
Luther Dickinson is on bass on a few tracks, Blake Rhea is on others, he lost his life last year in November.
Ori: The awesome part is that Luther was with us early on, he was on our first record…and he was always with us, we talked and we hang out. When we knew what we wanted to do with this album, he was the first person we thought about. And we ended up writing “Sisters” and “We Are” with him. We wrote it during the touring season, in the summer. I wish we had more time with him, if we had more time with Luther we would have had more songs, because he really brings out the best of us. It’s always fun when we hang out or play with him.
You wrote with Cody Dickinson on the previous record.
Ori: True, he wrote “Heathen Hearts” and “Push Now” with us, but he didn’t play on the record.
Tierinii: I think TK played on Cody’s record and both me and TK were featured in a North Mississippi Allstars record.
Like you the Dickinsons have a family band, yet they do their own projects sometimes.
Ori: We need a few more years before we do other things!
Tierinii: We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
Ori: But, yes a lot of similarities…
Tierinii: They feel like the male version of me and my siblings.
When you put the band together, ten years ago, more or less, did you imagine this kind of journey?
Tierinii: No, no, it’s hard to imagine something like this. It was hard to see it, there were many days where I had my doubts, but I knew that the relationships that we were building while we were writing music were very solid. So it felt like we were put in this position for a reason. And we were committed to that. We couldn’t see the future but it felt right and to see it all unfold this way it’s really a good feeling.
Ori: I think that getting signed by Stax for our first record it really shuffled the cards…I think each of us knew we were gonna do good, for who we were, but we didn’t expect to be discovered by the industry so quick. We had just met each other eight month earlier, at that time. So we didn’t expect to be on Stax, or Alligator or being nominated for a Grammy. We just wanted to be good and then things happened around us.
You always recorded in some Memphis studios, Ardent, Zebra, Sun or Royal, is it a precise choice? There is a lot of history in those places.
Ori: It doesn’t really matter what studio we’re in, what matters is the people we’re in the studio with. It’s about who we’re going to work with. What matters is that we have the conditions that we need…we don’t like having a lot of people going in and out of the studio visiting, we don’t like a lot of traffic. We are in a different mode. But it doesn’t matter where we are. We care about giving back to the community and we believe in bringing music back to Memphis. So I’d rather put my money where my mouth is and record in Memphis, if I have a budget to record I want to give it to the people in town, to invest back in town. And talk about a Memphis studio with you and a studio in L.A. It’s important for us. So it’s not because of the history as much as the people here are great. Boo (Mitchell) was great to work with. Kevin Houston was amazing.
It’s a responsibility to give back something to Memphis, in a way.
Tierinii: You’re correct but it doesn’t really feel like a responsibility, more something we’re proud of. I’ve been here my whole life and I know what we have here, the legacy. Memphis produced great music for years and years and it’s exciting to record in Memphis.
Three years ago you did a soulful cover of a Genesis song, “That’s All” and on stage you have done stuff by the likes of Tina Turner or Ann Peebles. Will you put out a cover EP at some point?
Ori: I think it would be a great idea. And we talked about it even with Luther. We were talking about ideas for the next record. But this is the fourth album and we have released all original songs, except for one cover on the first record. It makes for forty or fifty originals, we have been producing a lot of originals, that’s why we are musicians. For us, for me at least, the only reason to exist in the music world is with my own songs, my own musicality. Playing other people’s music is fun but it’s not what I willing to leave my family behind and go do. And that’s what we have been doing, everything we accomplished so far is because of our own music and creation. But it’s getting to the time where people know who we are and when they hear a great cover by us they know us enough to go back and listen to our own music. Early on it was a thing. On the first record John Burk said, “we got to have a cover”. So we said OK. On the second record we said no, third record no and now it’s also a no. We still have stories to tell.
Tierinii, you grew up in the church and you maybe were kind of sheltered and then you discovered and experimented with a lot of different music. What was that process of discovery like for you?
Tierinii: Oh for me it was a whole new world. Because, yes I grew up very sheltered, I was not allowed to listen to anything else so whatever I was listening to I was sneaking it, I had to find or dig. When I left home there was a huge rift between me and my family when I decided to do secular music, I was basically out on the street, kind of cut off. I was down on Beale Street and they have this press notes with names and they’re all blues singers and also in the clubs, like B.B. King’s up at the top walls, the walls are covered in photos with names like Koko Taylor…when I left home I was reading these names and I had no clue who these people are. Even then I had to learn some songs and I realized oh that’s the name I saw on the wall…I grew up in this culture but there was so much that didn’t connect until I immersed myself in it. Even to this day I’m still discovering old blues artists and my mind flashes back to that wall. I’m still connecting my heritage to where I come from, it’s a never-ending journey. Because I’m a music nerd and all I ever wanted was to play music, to dance and feel free. I was just a kid and I got myself in a whole lot of trouble, but I did end up having music to myself, it came with its ups and down but I’m still here living that dream.
Southern Avenue photo Rory Doyle
Does it happen that Ori knows some stuff that you don’t?
Ori: Oh yes, until today. But there’s other stuff that I don’t know that she knows. It’s not a one way relationship when getting to know new music. But yes, I came to Memphis as a fan and she has not that state of mind at all. But again that’s what’s great about Memphis, there’s not that many cities in America where people come not to become millionaires but to become better musicians and create music that is good. Memphis always draws some of the best. It’s magical. Beale Street does not exist anywhere else in the country other than Bourbon Street in New Orleans of course.
Southern Avenue has a very distinct sound, maybe it’s a combination of your blues background Ori and the soulful vocals of Tierinii.
Ori: Thank you, I like that. There’s something about the spiritual journey of all of this. I think me, Tierinii, TK and Ava we are all really about the music. It’s not about ego or success…
Tierinii:…or accolades or being the best. The responsibility we all have is to keep making music, keep creating it, not just performing it to get the gigs, but creating something that connects with people, with your stories, the integrity of music is really what drives us.
Ori: And when it’s about music, there’s a common ground where we all operate on. That enables us to do a lot of things. To explore, for example, our last album “Be The Love You Want” was intentionally Memphis soul/ Isaac Hayes and complex, the songwriting was trying to do what we felt was the most beautiful song, not the most successful or radio friendly or the most blues. We didn’t even try to fit anything. We just tried to write the best songs we felt we had at that moment. And that leads to a lot of creativity.
And being called Southern Avenue allows you to explore without being linked to a specific genre.
Tierinii: Yes, but I think blues is the foundation of it all. When you grow up in that sound, it doesn’t matter what genre you choose, it’s always going to have that accent, that deep influence.
Ori: We are playing Memphis blues. And Memphis blues is R&B, Memphis blues is funky…and especially with this album, if you take our catalog, you can say it’s different colors of Memphis music. And what is Memphis music if not blues? We don’t feel like each album was perfect, we were just trying to do our best.
I feel like some of your music is really uplifting music, with a positive message, like the Staples Singers in the Sixties and Seventies, would you agree with that?
Tierinii: Yes, I personally write lyrics in the way that I speak to myself…and because I went through so much when I was younger with my family, I had to be my own support system. So these lyrics are the ways not only I encourage myself, but we encourage each other. When we had troubled times we really wrote our way through it.
Ori: I can give you an example. “Don’t Give Up” was written because of “Long Is The Road”. “Long Is The Road” is my story. I wrote “Don’t Give Up” exactly at the time that the song is about, I was cheated on, I lost everything…but I didn’t give up, I didn’t want to go back home and stop it. I said to myself I’m gonna do this again. Or “Gotta Keep The Love” is a song where we said to ourselves that we want to write a song that doesn’t resolve in a positive way. That’s how we started but we could not do it and we ended up with Gotta Keep The love, which is positive. We could not bring ourselves to write something that has no positive resolution.
Tierinii: I think at this point in our career we’re very aware that music is healing…it’s a tool and you can use it irresponsibly or you can make the decision to uplift people. That’s what we need, that’s what we get out of music. And we need encouragement, self-empowering…this kind of attitude in order to make it to where we are. When we get feedback from the fans and they tell us what certain songs have don for them well that’s what we wanna be in the world. When they come to our show we want them to feel lifted and free from everything that holds you down. And you can feel it in the community we created.
Southern Avenue phot Rory Doyle
You did two records with Stax, one with BMG and this one with Alligator, yet I get the impression the labels didn’t change you and you managed to be yourself nonetheless.
Ori: thank you. It was not easy. Even John Burk who is our n. 1 supporter, our producer, the guy who signed us to Stax…even him he tried to influence us.
Tierinii: we were such a young band…our identity was still being developed withing the band. Because we got signed so young everybody wanted to through ideas and influences…it was like do like this band, listened to this other band
Ori: Not in a negative way, they were trying to make us succeed…early on it was Alabama Shakes and it’s a great band we love them, but it doesn’t matter what label you work with, the label is there to help us be the best version of us. I think these days labels want somebody that already know what they’re doing. Alligator signed us when they had already heard the majority of the album. They knew what we were about to do. They loved it and they enabled us to keep doing it. John Burk is the producer and Boo Mitchell the engineer and they allowed us to dig into the Southern Avenue sound. That is me on guitar and the girls singing and clapping and foot stomping. It means a lot to us that people recognize who we are no matter who we work with or what society tells us…
You knew Bruce Iglauer long before.
Ori: I think Bruce had seen us since 2016, so they knew everything about us. What matters is the team you have but the team should not touch the music. And the music was never an issue. John Burke made us feel like we made all the decisions even though we didn’t. But I’m not saying that every label is the same. Alligator is a great partner.
Did having Ava joining the band affect the dynamics of the band?
Tierinii: I think she expanded us, she elevated our sound with her violin…when we wrote with TK we did three parts harmonies and then did just two or bring her in. I think she made the band what it is always supposed to be.
Ori: My perspective on it is that Ava joining created something that can’t be replicated. Them singing together and being the focal point of the songwriting, it is unique. There’s a lot of sisters that sing together but their musicality is different. Tierinii is a singer and a songwriter, TK is a drummer, a singer and a songwriter, Ava sings, plays percussion and violin, she’s the only one with an actual degree in music. So they’re not just singers. Nobody knew Ava and now they do and they know how we sound with her, so we told her when she joined the it would be full time. She’s an equal partner in the company. That’s the thing.
How did your guitar playing change, having great singers in the band?
Ori: It is different for sure, it’s like I’m in a band with Aretha Franklin, I’m not going to do Stevie Ray Vaughan on that. And I also wrote the songs, which have a lot of chords a complex guitar work. This album I used a lot of open tunings. I think I grew up a lot as a guitar player… I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and a lot of blues and jazz, I listened to discographies so I want to make sure that when it’s all said and done, you’re gonna have a complete journey and it’s gonna be from album to album not song to song. The first album was basics, the second was about doubling parts, coming up with counterpoints and making room for the horns. The third album was about creating a space all in the mix for the guitar. This one is completely different, because I got bored with my playing and my sound, I felt like I cannot have a fourth record with the same thing. That’s why I decided to learn open tunings and to write all of our songs in open tunings. For example the riff of “Rum Boogie” is the first I learned with slide. I had Luther come, he spent a week in our house and he helped me pick that up. He managed within a week to shift my mind and give me the confidence to record slide and do shows playing it. I wanted to reinvent myself and do something new. This album some songs are in open C, the slower songs, other like “Late Night Get Down” are in open D…the point is I wanted the listener to hear progress, to bring different things out. It’s like learning the guitar again from scratch. Because if you play night after night you get bored from your own licks…in every show I try to do something different.
Is there any music or artists do you like to listen to that inspired in some ways the things you make on your records?
Ori: I think we go through phases, when we did “Be The Love You Want” we listened to a lot of Curtis Mayfield, especially the album with the Staple Singers and a lot of Isaac Hayes. For this one it was a lot of Memphis Minnie, B.B. King, Skip James, some hill country blues, Koko Taylor, you know Tierinii didn’t know her until a few years ago and I was like, how can you not know her?
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