Jazzmeia Horn’s grandmother knew that Jazzmeia’s mother was pregnant before the mother did herself. Her grandmother told her she would have a musical child, who should be christened Jazzmeia. Her mother’s response? “Hopefully, it’s a girl!” Despite the name, it was gospel and soul music that filled young Jazzmeia’s early life.
She began singing in an adult church choir aged three, and given everyone she knew in the world could sing, she was shocked when she first encountered children who couldn’t. Growing up, everyone in Jazzmeia Horn’s life could sing. Credit: “When I went to primary school,” she recalls, via Zoom, “the teacher was asking some of the students to sing This Little Light of Mine – I went to this Christian school – and some of the kids were yelling .
I remember being like, ‘What the hell is going on? You guys can’t hear ?’ So I went home and I told my mom, ‘Something is wrong with the kids at school. Their brains aren’t working or something.’ I didn’t know that everybody couldn’t sing.
I didn’t know that my family had a gift. I was five, and it messed me up for a long time.” Jazz entered her life at the same Dallas high school that previously nurtured Norah Jones, and she soon became a singer of startling virtuosity and imagination, winning the most prestigious awards and enjoying a blossoming career.
She’s also a composer and lyricist of note, an arranger, a band-leader, an educator and a record label boss. She .