Sax-y Blues Women’s Collier to Action

The Santa Barbara Blues Society hosts the local debut of East Coast-based award-winning blues singer-songwriter Vanessa Collier. The rare female bandleading saxophonist, a native Texan, grew up in Maryland and graduated from Boston’s famed Berklee School of Music. She spent two years in blues legend Joe Louis Walker’s band before branching out on her own. Her half dozen albums have claimed four of Blues Foundation’s prestigious Blues Music Awards, including Contemporary Female Blues Artist of the Year, and three more just this year including Horn Player of the Year.

Collier’s latest record is a bold one, Do It My Own Way (which true to its title was recorded on analog gear with the musicians largely in one room) inspired by the classic Memphis soul sound of Stax and Hi Records. Collier had multiple roles in the recording, including writing the songs, producing, arranging horns and all instrumental and vocal parts, playing acoustic and electric guitars as well as alto and tenor saxophones and flute, plus singing the lead and background vocals. 

“I have been very fortunate to be able to direct my career,” she told an interviewer earlier this year. “I’ve gotten a lot of opportunities from other people, but on the whole, every decision has been mine.”

“Wild As a Rainstorm” is an example. 

“It’s sort of a love letter to the next generation of girls that everybody’s telling, ‘you can’t do this,’” Collier said in the interview. “If you know in your heart and in your soul that you are meant to do something, you just try it. You’re allowed to fail… If it doesn’t work, you can pick yourself back up and choose a different path. Just be daring, be yourself, be willing to take some risk.” 

The closing track sums it up, as “Warrior” portrays a powerful woman delivering a message about the strength and experience of women in general, as well as a tribute to Collier’s mother. The song not so subtly addresses the sexism she’s encountered in life and in the music industry.

“The opening lines are a piercing statement of the overused, antiquated, and tired views within the industry,” Collier explained in the album’s press release. “The lyrics of the second verse demonstrate how the industry attempts to put and keep women ‘in their place’ by undermining them. Most artists I admire – Prince, James Brown, and Bonnie Raitt – went against the grain and did things that people hadn’t thought of before and that people hadn’t seen before, changing the industry as they went. This song is an assurance that I will continue to choose to fight quietly or publicly, if needed, to represent myself the way I want to be represented in this industry, and that I will not allow someone else to define who I am. It’s also a statement of hope that the industry is, can, and will continue to progress.”

Amen, sister. But to be clear, a Collier concert is a sermon. She loves it when people sit and listen and perhaps even more when they get up and dance. Which is what the Blues Society provides in the concert at the Carrillo Recreation Center on Saturday, November 22.  

Visit www.SBBlues.org.