For those unaware, on October 28th, 2022, Resonance Records, the acclaimed jazz label, issued the first album by one of the most promising young jazz singers to emerge in years: Tawanda Suessbrich-Joaquim, known simply as Tawanda.

The Los Angeles-based vocalist, 26, sings in a cloudless alto with a crystalline shimmer, effortless but unfussy jazz feeling, immaculate musicianship, and a maturity that few of her contemporaries possess.

Smile was produced by Resonance founder and president George Klabin. Resonance is renowned both for its deluxe reissues of previously unreleased gems by Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, and other greats; and for its new recordings by an impeccably chosen array of veterans and newcomers.

1. Smile/I’m All Smiles
2. Out of This World
3. Bridges
4. Sister Moon
5. What a Little Moonlight Can Do
6. I’m Okay
7. A Child is Born
8. Lucky to Be Me
9. Sack Full of Dreams
10. Bring Back My Dreamer
11. You and The Night and The Music
12. Smile Outro (A Cappella)

This oh-so pure, magnificently cultured new album opens on a resonant, buoyant jazz waltz within Smile/I’m All Smiles and a, at first, Doo wop-esque Out of This World and then backs those up with the veritably shimmering Bridges, a beautifully lush rendition of Sting’s Sister Moon and then comes an upbeat and joyful What a Little Moonlight Can Do and an impassioned cover of Eddie del Barrio’s I’m Okay is along next.

On Smile, Tawanda gives even the most time-honored standards a freshness that makes them sound new, as is shown on her stunning rendition of the jazz standard A Child is Born, which bleeds seamlessly into a smokey, layered and harmonious Lucky to Be Me, and then we get the languishing beauty version of Donny Hathaway’s Sack Full of Dreams, the ornate gossamer of Maureen McGovern’s Bring Back My Dreamer, the album rounding out on the suave hipsway of You and The Night and The Music, closing on an A Capella outro of Smile (where she overdubs her voice into airy four-part harmony).

In June of 2021, Tawanda tied for first place with Gabrielle Cavassa in the 9th Annual Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, held in Newark, New Jersey. (The competition was originally slated to be held in 2020 but delayed due to COVID. The winner of the 10th annual competition was also announced in 2021).

Her performance — judged by a panel that included singers Carmen Lundy and Vanessa Rubin and bassist Christian McBride — was all the more impressive given that Tawanda had performed her first full show just a year before.

Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico to a German-born mother and a father from Mozambique, Tawanda spent her school years honing her vocal gifts in school musicals and choirs. Jazz entered her life at eighteen when she enrolled in Santa Fe University of Art and Design; there she began studying with Mirabai Daniels, a jazz singer whose husband, clarinetist Eddie Daniels, is another Resonance artist.

Mirabai raved to George about Tawanda. After she’d graduated in 2019, the young woman moved to Southern California and met him. He was struck by her “natural ability to interpret the jazz-vocal idiom with any song she chose.” George began to mentor her, and produced a few demos.

Once the time was right, he booked her into Campus JAX, a supper club in Newport Beach, California. Soon afterward he submitted her for the Vaughan competition. The outcome made it overwhelmingly clear that Tawanda was ready for an album.

Together they chose a broad range of songs that show off what Tawanda can do. The predominant theme is optimism. With all the hardships and upheavals that the pandemic brought, it was important for her to boost people’s spirits, including her own. “I was at a really low moment,” she says. “To go into the studio and sing songs about joy and dreams and love was a big challenge but at the same time it inspired me to keep my head up. You can manifest through singing.”

Tawanda - Smile (Official Video Promo)

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