“I’ve been coming here since I was nineteen years old,” Kelela Mizanekristos explained after performing her song “Take Me Apart”. A college student in the early 2000s, Mizanekristos would make the over 200-mile drive from D.C. to the West Village in New York City to spend an evening at the Blue Note Jazz Club. She didn’t care that she had a class at seven the next morning. She was only there to watch one woman: Amel Larrieux, founding member of the R&B duo Groove Theory.
“I used to bring my MiniDisk recorder and hold it underneath the table… and then I’d drive back to D.C. the same night… plug the aux straight into the MiniDisk, and listen to the set that I had just heard,” Mizanekristos shared, accompanied by the plucks of the harp and the melody of the Rhodes piano. Mizanekristos, otherwise known by her stage name Kelela, was always fascinated by R&B. She closely studied Larrieux’s approach to music and the “intersection between jazz and R&B” that Larrieux “laid out so beautifully,” as Kelela explained in an interview with Pitchfork. “Her shows were beautiful experiences,” Kelela shared, “and every person that I ever took to see her would be in tears at some point. She brings it so hard.”
Fast-forward to May of 2024. Kelela finds herself back at the Blue Note, over two decades after her first visit. Over a two-day residency at the renowned venue, the singer performed an array of songs in what she would excitedly call a “full circle moment” for her. Nine months later, highlights from her Blue Note debut were released as a live album titled In the Blue Light.
It’s clear that those bootlegged recordings of Larrieux taught Kelela well. The 12-track album spans just over an hour, but in its sixty-three-minute runtime, you find Kelela at her strongest. As the singer jumps from track to track, she walks a fine tightrope between R&B and jazz: sometimes bouncing—even dancing—but never falling. Mizanekristos knows how to transform her songs into an electrifyingly passionate performance. Even the Arca-produced “Blue Light” and co-produced “Take Me Apart” are flawlessly worked into a jazz-R&B dreamscape.
“So much of the… vulnerability in my lyricism… the way I want to take my time with the… unfolding [of my music]… it’s very much a Betty [Carter] moment,” Kelela explains at the end of her unplugged performance of “Blue Light”. Alongside songs from her catalog, covers of Betty Carter’s “30 Years” and “Love Notes” are featured on the album.
Kelela’s reverence for Carter comes from her father’s expansive record collection, especially from cultural strongholds such as Tracy Chapman, Miriam Makeba, and Carter. “[Carter] is someone I look up to, like, with lyrics,” Mizanekristos notes in an interview with The Ringer. “She’s really sort of colloquial and really sort of conversational in her writing. She really, kinda… tells it like it is. You can feel how she really talks in her music.” The singer’s admiration for Carter is evident in her covers, her voice softly humming lyrics as the faint percussion of glasses and cutlery fill the room. Alongside tributes to Carter, the album also features a special performance of Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues”.
Kelela has always been at the forefront of a new wave of musicians—those who are constantly pushing the boundaries of their work. As Mizanekristos continues to blur the lines between electronic and R&B music, In the Blue Light is a reminder that she still tends to the “jazz seed” (as the singer calls it) that her father “deliberately planted” in her.
