Jamila Woods retraces a legacy of progress through sound

The track list for Jamila Woods’ sophomore album reads like a roll call of icons of black history. Zora. Miles. Basquiat. Baldwin. Every song on the aptly titled LEGACY! LEGACY! is named after a major intellectual figure who changed the way we think about art, identity and race. ‘I was really utilising these people as a vehicle to tell parts of my own story that were maybe too difficult, or that I just wasn't able to do in a more straightforward way,’ says Woods.  

Take as an example the song ‘SONIA,’ named after poet Sonia Sanchez, in which Woods confronts toxic relationships with the chorus, ‘it was bad, it was bad.’ The line, Woods explains, is borrowed from one of Sanchez’s poems, and resonates for Woods in its simplicity: ‘Just owning it,’ Woods says, ‘and that not being an act of weakness to dwell on that, but really like an act of strength to name it for what it was.’ 

Even in angling towards progress, it is important to continue to analyse the past: ‘It's so confounding to me that there's this idea that, “ok, we've already talked about this enough,”’ Woods says. Indeed, much of the power behind Woods’ music derives from her ability to fearlessly identify and name things for what they are, be it toxic relationships, misogyny and anger or joy, love and acceptance. The way she does so, however — by embodying voices from the past and bringing them into contemporary rotation — reveals that progress is not a one-way avenue into the future. It is a two-way street that involves properly learning from history. 

This month, in honour of International Women’s Day and our theme of ‘Progress,’ Woods has curated a series of three events at Soho House Chicago and a playlist for House Notes. Read more and find her playlist below and on Spotify.

‘I met Kara through Young Chicago Authors (YCA), where I was her teaching artist and mentor. She's also a musician, and released an EP last year, so we're going to do an acoustic concert together. I'm also going to interview her about her process of songwriting and making her EP, Songs for Every Chamber of the Heart. Her lyricism is amazing, and she's an incredible poet too, so I want to talk to her about how those processes intersect. And being a black woman artist, I hear and see her tweeting about the topic of genre, and about how when black artists make music that's outside of traditionally genres that are seen as black – if they make folk music or rock