ginger

Ginger Jackson

Interview 15 October 2004

Hi Ginger – how you doing

I am physically well...as far as musically, it's been a huge mountain that I have been climbing for a while now. Isn't everyone though? :)

How’s the CD shaping up. What kind of interest are you getting locally nationally and internationally.

This is still a relatively new project. My release date was June 26th, 2004. My product was late...I did not receive full product until Mid-August. Therefore, within the last couple of months I have been gigging with my band Elixir and selling CD's face-to-face and online. Nationally, Vibe Magazine has a Free Agent section of their magazine that I submitted material for, called me a month ago and said that I am in the top 3 for selection. Internationally, I am awaiting CD reviews from emags that are dedicated to soul music in Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and the UK. They have responded favorably to my music so far...I will better track the results once those reviews are posted.

Tell me about the album, how long it took to put together. It’s your first one isn’t it?

The album is called Ghetto-Bourgeois - Jazz, Hip-Hop, R&B and Soul Music to bring out the dual nature in all of us.

The title of this album is important because Ghetto-Bourgeois is a descriptive word used to describe an individual such as myself. Separate from Ghetto-Fabulous, I was born in a middle-class neighborhood to a mother who grew up in Atlantic, Iowa (they were of course the only black family in town) and a father who grew up in Shelby, North Carolina. We were never crazy rich, nor crazy poor...budget minded. I see both sides of the coin...I am right in the middle. When I first tried to shop a deal, I was told that I was a middle of the road artist...not commercial enough. This was because I was doing a fusion of Jazz and Hip-Hop straight out of SC. Since Erykah was the only one out at that time, I was labeled an Erykah copy, but little did the industry know that there was a whole under culture of music similar to mine. Myself, I did not know what to call it....I just knew that I had awesome songs, great talent, Ella's skillz (scatting) and loved Jazz/Hip-Hop. Therefore, I took a look at my life, who I was as a person and decided to call my style Ghetto-Bourgeois. In the meantime, life happens and I had to make a living as a salesperson.

Reality hit me last year. My parents sat me down and told me that they would rather have me be a starving musician than a successful salesperson because I would be doing what made me happy. I took that to heart and started to make arrangements to leave my job. I left June of last year in order to work on this project. At the time, I was just going to press up my catalog of songs and sell the CD out the back of my trunk, like an MC. But then my fiancé/partner persuaded me to start from scratch and make my best 2 songs great fillers. Therefore, we found a couple of new producers John "BiggJohn" Meyers who makes the project more soul based and Brian Demby who makes the project underground.

Yes, this is my first full-length CD. Although, I do have many demos circulating. It's amazing how much encouragement I am receiving from people who have heard of me before or who even have my demos. They tell me that they are happy that I stuck with it.

And you happy with the product.

I will never push music that is not worthy of being pushed. I am more than happy with making the decision to start over essentially. Now I have plenty of songs to push out as a mixed tape venture. It's perfect.

How tough is it as an independent.

It's tough. I never wanted to be in this position...I was actually afraid of the independent scene and therefore, I was trying to shop myself. What I learned is that through my experience in the industry and in sells coupled with my fiancé's knowledge in business and corporate sales...it works. Now I see that independent is exactly what it means. Yes, I have to work double hard to be where I want to be, but in the long run I will be better off for doing so. When a label approaches me, they are going to have to come with a platter of offerings...mostly because I have helped them by having my own fanbase. A label will only be able to assist me.

Lot’s of influences in there some old Soul through to contemporary R’n’B and Hip Hop beats with some jazz thrown in. Who are influences both growing up and now. Are you more into say a Badu or a Jill Scott than some of the current crop of R’n’B artists?

My background is in Jazz. My favorites are Ella, Bobby McFerrin, Freddie Hubbard, Chick Corea and Dizzy Gillespie. Growing up my idol was/is Denise Williams...hopefully you can tell that I am highly influenced by her through the timbre of my voice. Yes, I love Badu and Jill Scott, but right now I love to listen to Alternative singer/songwriters such as Dave Matthews, John Meyers and even Maroon 5, Bjork. I believe that their song structures are unbelievable and I try to fuse their lyrical styles with mine. Ghetto-Bourgeois is going to expand in the future as I grow...it is me and my style. This project for now must start with what you and myself are familiar with. Just like Outcast...as they grow as musicians, we grow as listeners. I want to be an artist like that.

Tracks like Cool Out is very Jazzy and you get down on Roc wit me.

It's Ghetto-Bourgeois. We must not set boundaries on our music. The African American culture is made up of so much that I did not want to limit myself to just the norm in soul music. Roc Wit Me is a "Dance Tune"....when I first started everyone wanted me to have one...and I found a track that I loved and it moved me to write about dancing. It is funny how when things are right, the words come purring out. Therefore, when one is on their way to the club, they can still roll with me. Cool Out was my first song that I wrote to over a Hip-Hop track. That track truly defines me and my music. I will sing that song until I'm ninety. :)

There’s quite a variety so what tracks are getting attention. Personally I like the haunting Silence and Home

WOW! It is always different for each person. It's weird how this CD also crosses many demographics and even then I cannot track what works with each demographic because I find that each person takes away what they want. Yes, the "single" is Searching, but my underground types are feeling Free. I never receive much comment of the songs that you mention, yet those are probably the 2 songs that are the most personal. Silence is about the unwavering support that a woman has for her man, especially when life is not working for him. Home is about that time in a relationship where a man is trying to run out with the boys all the time and then he must make that decision to give up that "playas card" in order to have a serious relationship.

Wher do you see yourself in the grand old theme of things – bit more soulfulness creeping back into the market – and not before time?

I see myself as a leader...a singers singer. Ghetto-bourgeois is not only the name of my album, it is who I am. I want that to encompass more as years come. I will never go completely overboard, but I will stretch my listeners ear...musically, vocally and stylistically.

Who helped you put the album together – do you have a close knit team. There are several producers.

First off I have an awesome support base of producers who have contributed to the project. I want to shot out my boys John Meyers and Brian Demby...they both contributed the most tracks. There is also my boy Shaheed and his production company Off Beat Productions. Although he did not have any of his beats on the album, I did get Another Side of Heaven out of that camp...What up Gahara and Anthony! Shaheed has been a huge supporter for a while now and has always been there for bouncing musical ideas off. Also, my boys from DC Manistyles production and I can never forget my boy who has been there from the beginning Fuego One who did "Cool Out".

And are they the same people who you perform with . What’s your show like - you’re doing a few shows right now?

OK...this is another side of my story...God works in mysterious ways and always for the better. I have an 8-piece fully professional band. My works are completely arranged out professionally. My musical Director is Mr. Corni Mims, who is one of the top MD's in R&B music today. I have known him for a couple of years now and when he heard this project and saw my progress, he was down to assist. He got us in contact with some awesome players and I am happy to work with them on a weekly basis. We set out to create a family atmosphere and I think we have that. Since we do not have any dough to put out, we have Corni act as an advisor by tightening us up and then we use Bugs our bass player as head of the band when Corni is not there. Bugs is an awesome MD in his own right as well and I am happy to have him on board. My band is Wendy Marie, Na'Tori Fleming, Marcus Johnson, Olajide Paris, Bugs, Crystal and Jamil. What's up yall! Yes, we have roughly 4 gigs a month now and currently we are working on getting a regular weekend spot in Riverside.

You wrote pretty much the whole album – tell me about the concepts in putting the album together – it’s quite a conceptual album. Where do you draw from…and Papa is very personal I would think.

Currently, I have a catalog of 40 songs. When I started last year, I was going to just put out my music pieced together. I wanted it to be called Ginger Jackson "RAW" because this would be untouched from the industry...all natural. My partner/fiancé D'Anthony Robertson went to have some industry people listen to the music and they liked it, but they thought that it did not have any continuity. I was upset because I did not want any industry to have any influence over what I was doing on my own. D'Anthony said that it was not the music, it was the fact that many of the songs were an accumulation of 6 years and that it would be best to keep the best 2 songs and make them awesome fillers. He is a great motivator and that is what we did. I kept "Cool Out" and "Scorpio Man"...those were undeniable. The first time we knew that we had something completely outstanding was when I wrote "Searching". The songs just kept rolling and since then. "Papa" was the last song on the album. This was a very personal song, which is actually a true story describing a time that D'Anthony and I went to the doctors office and there was a homeless guy who walked in for an appointment. The song is about what I was thinking and what I saw and how a sista felt compelled to help a brotha out. The weirdest coincidence was that a week later, I drove past the same guy on another street corner with the same sign. I was that person who could help him for that day only. I don;t mean to get political, but it is election time and I am always shocked to see people spending time and money in other countries and none down the street on their corner. Not to say that it is not needed and that they do not spend money in their communities, I'm just saying that more needs to be done.

Back to the album, whenever we met anyone to tell them the concept of who Ginger was/is as an artist, I would always start with my concept of Ghetto-Bourgeois. After a while we just decided to call the project Ghetto-Bourgeois because we figured that people would wonder what Ghetto-Bourgeois was...which has worked beautifully with our marketing. Ghetto-Bourgeois also worked because I wanted to have the autonomy to roll into any genre I wanted to. My CD is truly a mixture of the genres that all support good soul music.

Now tell me a bit about yourself, wher you’re from, where you are now.

Born in Los Angeles. My family lived here until I was in the 6th grade. I went to a Christian private school in Marina Del Rey. When I was in the 6th grade we moved with my grandmother out in Riverside where I went to public school and graduated from John W North High School. We took care of my grandmother in her old age. I then came back to Los Angeles an and attended college at USC where I studied Vocal Jazz in there music school.

Musical Family?

No. My family wonders where I got it from. Mom plays some piano and sent me to piano lessons and every week I would stop my teacher because I had a new song that I was working on. :)

And you were singing from an early age. You were recognised early as a Jazz Singer…and you came to Europe?

I was singing at an early age, but no one liked it. I had a high piercing voice and loved to sing high. Private school was great because it had music as part of the curriculum. We learned basic music theory at a young age along side of Math, Science...we also had bible study to. :) When we moved to Riverside, I had no competition, so I was known as the girl from LA who could sing and all of a sudden I was popular because of that. At that time I was in love with Deniece Williams and would mostly sing all of her repertoire. In high school, the highest level choir to get into was the Jazz Ensemble. I was invited to join my Sophomore year (never did they allow Freshmen in because it was an award winning choir). Along side of that, I made my home at Harvest Christian Fellowship, and was the youngest singer they had on their Worship Team. Along side of all this I was training as a classical singer, performed around town as a wedding/event singer and yes traveled through different competitions and honor choirs. I did tour through Europe with a National Choir the summer right before leaving to college.

And you studied vocal jazz at University?

Yes, I have a BM from University of Southern California Vocal Jazz Studies. I was the first singer to go through the full four year program, when it was first starting. Some of my friends that I went to school with are Chris Pierce, Claudia Alexander, Trevor Lawrence, Renee Goldsberry and Donald Vega. These are the people that I learned from while I was there. On the side we would all run through World Stage and 5 Street Dick's were all the jam sessions were...had a chance to catch up with Billy Higgins and also Billy Childs. As a vocalist, I chose to take classes that vocalists did not take because I wanted to learn everything an instrumental player learned. That is where my scatting technique derives from. Some improve classes even threw me on piano, so I had to solo on my secondary instrument. It was lots of work when it came time to play Miles solos or Parker solos on the keys, but I did it. I am to this day better for it.

And at what point did it become a career thing.

It was always a career thing...I just got side tracked from the career thing. I did not know how the career thing worked. I got out of college and was invited to study at Manhattan School of Music in New York, but I did not know if getting a Masters degree would work for me who wanted a career. So I stayed in Los Angeles and met Fuego One and another cat Phixation, a couple of hip-hop producers. We started working on a demo. I got management who in turn got Julio G of 100.3 The Beat radio station to play my song on Battle of the Beats. Little did we all know that my song "Cool Out" would go on to win 4 nights in a row on a commercial station. From there we had record companies calling us for months...but when it came down to it, my management was inexperienced and so was I. I did not know that I had to have a marketing plan, they wanted to see more than what I had to offer, more music, more pictures, more articles on me, more fanbase...All I had was a 5 song demo. On top of that I did not know what to call my experiment of Hip-Hop/Jazz. Again, I say at that time only Erykah was out doing her thing in this area and I was looked at as a copy-cat. Little did the industry know that there was the soul movement going on. Neither did I, so I could not explain myself. At the same time, I did not want to change myself to what they wanted. So I was stuck in Corporate America.

And what are you doing now – promoing the album?

The biggest thing that I did was built a strong team around myself. Not an industry team like the books say. I am my own manager, my own booking agent and my own accountant. More than that, I have a strong band, a strong set of producers, a strong partner who has a great head for business and now we are doing things the right way, building our fanbase, building our portfolio. This music industry is a numbers game and it is all about the bottom line. We are not only pushing myself out there, we are developing a strategy for success and then we will eventually start over with others. People who are like me that need a chance and need to know how to set themselves up correctly. That's is what R Kelly, Master P, Puffy and Damon Dash did. They set up the equation like a Math program and then put all their artists through the same equation. My partner (a USC Grad as well) and myself were lucky enough to have strong sales backgrounds and we are going to use everything we've got to get to the top of the game.

And what happens next

Right now it's the hustle. It's the relationship building. It's the getting up at 6:00am for gym, calls throughout the day, mailings at the end of the day and then off to the clubs at night. It's about being everywhere now so then we can be everywhere in the future and that is what we are planning to do. One does not have a strong company if they are not bringing new products to the market and diversifying. If we have it our way you will have another Magic Johnson corporation on your hands. Community redevelopment, Music Revolution, World Revolution. We must start from where we are now by selling a humble little project called Ghetto-Bourgeois. :)

Good luck and thanks for your time

Thank you so much Mike. Much love.

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