Precious Renee Tucker is a Genius

ON THE BRIGHT-RED BACK COVER OF THE VINYL FOR SUNLIGHT—the 1978 jazz-funk-disco album that, on its release, sent genre purists scrambling for their pearls and anxiety meds—⁠a venturesome Herbie Hancock sits hemmed in by 10 or 11 synthesisers, totally immersed and blissed out on his own sacrilege. “I immediately thought of that image when I first came across your videos,” says Kelela in mid-January over Zoom, taking a pull from a half-smoked joint before expertly rolling another. Hancock, former pianist with the Miles Davis Quintet and a leading architect of the post-bop sound, had an incurable addiction to technologi-cal experimentation and a near-heretical, congenital allergy to following tradition. In the freedom and imagination of this artist, Kelela, herself a nimble and avant-garde sculptor of electronic R&B, saw something of a spiritual predecessor. “There was just so much style,” she says, eyes widening. “I was like, ‘This person is clearly a genius.'"

Framed in the other Zoom window is Precious Renee Tucker, the Arkansas-born experimental pianist often seen sliding between four synthesisers, a piano, and a laptop. Tucker’s meditations often feel self-reflexive, like she’s discovering a thought or feeling just as it emerges from the keys. She’s as likely to share a video of herself plucking a delicate, forlorn interpretation of Chopin’s ‘Waltz in C-sharp minor, Op. 64 No. 2’ as she is to shred new, witchy phrases into a rendition of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Earth’s Creation’—a rendition so rattling and tectonic it feels capable of summoning lava from your phone speaker. “The piano has always been like my science lab, where I can take whatever curiosities or frustrations I have and not feel restricted by the information I’m getting back,” says Tucker.

It’s distinct from her experience of searching for answers within the rigid system of Christian morality she grew up with, or even from attempts to express abstract emotions within the punishing confines of the English language. “There’s a lot that our bodies are trying to communicate with us, and if we can tune into ourselves and our instincts, then that might be all the information you need to get as specific as you can about what you’re experiencing,” she says, conjuring a professorial air. When it comes to piano, to music, to art, she does not believe we should conceive of learning as something external and separate from us: it can be harder to listen to yourself than to read sheet music. For Tucker, the piano offers a new grammar of feeling. She can say things through music that she might struggle to put into words. And whatever secrets she folds into her private communion with the piano are legible enough to have inspired some of her musical heroes: Solange recently enlisted her to play the organ at a book launch for Saint Heron. Until recently, she was working as a waitress at a restaurant in Arkansas. The contrast has left her wondering: “Do I actually have longevity? Or is this just a glitch in the system? It all sort of happened by accident.”

It started with the church organist’s hands. The memory echoes. Tucker was always amazed by the emotional power the instrument projected into the nave, raising the congregation to their feet, bringing tears to their eyes, conjuring some Holy Spirit that coursed through their bodies. She sang in the choir beside her mother every Sunday, but spent more time dreaming about taking lessons from the pianist than pouring her heart into any gospel number. “Even as a young girl in church, everything had to be perfect: your hair, your slip, your silence,” she says. Rather than amplifying her curiosities about the world, and about herself, it dulled them. “I developed this complex where I would feel like I had to reject pleasure whenever I would experience it, and it would always be accompanied by guilt."

Kelela says, by way of commiseration: “Yeah, you’re supposed to believe that we’re all born sinners, and we have to atone for it forever.” For her part, Kelela grew up among the liturgical chants of her Ethiopian Orthodox church, though it did not shape her life in the same way it did Tucker’s. She didn’t start thinking of herself as a musician until later in life, though that musical voice had been there since childhood. “I learned to play the violin really young, and I was always trying to quit it,” she says. “But my dad would never let me.” She performed at winter recitals and sang in the church choir from the fourth grade onwards, but none of it resembled the music she truly loved, the records she grew up on: Tracy Chapman, Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan, Amel Larrieux. As she got older, she used file-sharing services like Napster to explore new genres like emo, punk, and grime, gradually building out the sort of rich, omnivorous musical palette that makes critics call you “experimental”. By the time she was in her mid-20s, Kelela was singing at café open mics around Washington, DC. And even as she learned to stretch her voice in Urdu and Arabic, she struggled to assert her own ideas over the well-trodden ground of jazz standards. “I didn’t even write my first song until I was 29,” she says.

The Detroit bassist and songwriter Felice Rosser, a Black pioneer of punk music, has spoken of how the form freed her from the tyranny of tech-nical virtuosity, a spectre that hangs over so many Black artistic traditions rooted in church music. It didn’t matter that Rosser had never been the best singer in her church choir: she could, instead, “just play my own thing".

Kelela’s discovery of heavy guitar induced a similar epiphany. “Before those songs are produced, before they’re metallised, they’re often just post-bop tunes—like, progressive metal sounds just like jazz when the guitarist plays it quietly,” she says. “There’s a lot of range that’s possible, and I think that allowed me to find myself, to hear myself in the music.” When she started dating the lead guitarist of a progressive metal band in her late 20s, she was surprised to find how their jam sessions helped both of them to access a fuller range of expression. The bebop jazz and neo-soul singers she loved had already cracked open a window for her; this contact with metal served to sharpen her experimental instincts. “It really helped me to uncover the strength in myself to cross untraversable terrain, and to hear melodies or phrases in challenging music that other people couldn’t hear,” she says. (Her real first project was actually an indie rock album, not the twitchy, avant-garde Cut 4 Memix tape that smashed together sensuous R&B with so many traditions of dance music it could make your head spin.) “Metal was one of my last stops before moving into dance music,” she says.

Tucker, too, found freedom in metal. “It really helped me to deal with and process my anger in a way that I never could with religion because Christianity always felt like submission to me,” she says. “It was like I had to be OK with everything, but God got to be really specific about what he was OK with.” She needed something bigger to articulate the nuances of all she was feeling. Metal, combined with the EDM she lost herself in at underground raves, supplied her with the permission to do that outside the church or the conservatory.

The library of classical music, she says, may well be incomplete. It may not account for the knowledge systems of other cultures, or other social locations that might see differently, feel differently, hear differently. Tucker has learned that there’s no real “wrong” way to play, no obligation to “respect” the instrument by the rigid western standards of musical interpretation. When you’re playing something “wrong”, what if you’re simply channelling a style that hasn’t yet been recorded? What if you’re conveying a feeling not accessible to the many European composers we celebrate and introduce to children on piano benches?

She’s not religious anymore, but Tucker’s speech and thinking are still enveloped in a kind of muted mysticism. “I take comfort in really vast concepts," she says, which is one reason she’s drawn to Kelela’s aquatic imagery: the boundlessness of other worlds, be they aquatic or intergalactic, reminds her of the universe’s expansiveness and, by extension, her own. “If there’s an infinite number of prime numbers, then maybe there are that many emotions to feel, that many possibilities, that many textures, that many colours, and maybe I can communicate those through the piano,” she says.

Kelela resonates with Tucker’s philosophy of experimentation: her belief that it’s not necessarily about rebellion, but about acknowledging the virtues of a mistake and “using chaos as [a] textbook”. As an experimental artist, Kelela says, “people really like the narrative that you’re fighting against something”. But it’s more about widening the frame. Letting the light in. “At its most basic level, classical music,” with its focus on adherence, memorisation, and precision, “is about doing it exactly as you heard it—it’s not about improvisation or interpretation,” she says.

Both artists, though, are more interested in the eureka of wrongness. It reminds me of an anecdote from Herbie Hancock, who was a nervous 23-year-old prodigy terrified of fucking up when he first joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1963. “I don’t pay you to just play to get applause,” Miles Davis once advised in that gravelly whisper he called a voice. “I want you to try new things, brand-new stuff. Don’t worry about the audience. I got the audience.”

Maybe you have to kill the imaginary audience to get closer to the truth: Kelela and Tucker, both only children, require solitude as a precondition for creation. You need distance from others, distance from the world, to see it all more clearly, to understand your place within it all. Kelela’s music often feels like a comfort to those who recover privately, to lovesick overthinkers who need aloneness to find solace. And for Tucker, music is a place where she can show up completely as herself. “It’s where I can accept myself, love myself, and where I only have myself to impress,” she says. When Kelela starts to cry, it occurs to me that my vision has gone a little blurry, too. ♥

Hair VIRGINIE DE PINTO MOREIRA at MA+Talent
Make up FEY CARLA ADEDIJI
Photography assistant MARIA GORODECKAYA
Movement IVY PAULO
Producer PHOEBE BUNJE
Executive producer CLAIRE BURMAN
Production coordinator LUCY TAYLOR
Production assistant FEB DESALEGENE