ADA MORGHE

“Initially I didn’t go there to make a whole album,” says Ada Morghe, who as Alexandre Helmig is a successful actress and an award-winning author in her native Germany. “My bassist, Livingstone Brown, is also a three times Grammy nominated producer, and each January he goes to Jamaica to work with Maxi Priest. I said to him, ‘You know what? I might just join you.’

With Brown, keyboard player Luke Smith and drummer Josh McNasty all having Jamaican heritage, Morghe decided to head out there and understand the music and culture that had shaped her band members’ lives. “I felt very much at home in Jamaica” she says of the trip. “I loved the spiritual side of the island, and the music of course, so Livingstone and I had an amazing creative journey and ended up with more than enough songs and ideas for an album.”
The result is a beautiful, intimate reflection on adult themes, such as keeping the passion alive, making the most of life’s sweet moments and capturing the closeness of two people in love, which is underpinned by a sound that, though not beholden to Jamaica’s musical traditions, certainly shares a spirit with them. There are other influences — Morghe’s love of Michael Kiwanuka shines through on the soulful Passion Play, while Different is a 60s R&B style belter on accepting that we will never all agree on political issues — but the shadow of the island looms large.

“We were staying in Montego Bay, we went to Kingston and Nine Mile Beach, and there were days when we got so lost in the music that we didn’t even leave the apartment,” says Ada. “Everything we saw, all the conversations we had, went into the album.”

There were also themes that Ada had been thinking about for a long time. She had wanted to write a song about the Amin Bird, or the Morghe-e Amin; a mythical bird of Persian literature symbolising hope. Legend has it that if someone expresses a sincere and heartfelt wish as the bird passes by, it will ensure that their wish comes true. Inspired by her avian namesake, Ada Morghe wrote Amin Bird, a rhythmic jazz classic with a touch of 1950s Broadway pizzazz. “And it’s great live. People go crazy to Amin Bird.”

The album begins with Pure Good Vibes, which with its laid back reggae lilt is the song most clearly influenced by Jamaica — and not least because Maxi Priest does a guest spot. “Maxi came to the studio, and he smashed it. He was very supportive, and very natural in his approach.”

Love Me Now is the most emotional and affecting song on the album, a sensual jazz masterpiece with a tender solo from the saxophonist Quinn Oulton, which plays to Morghe’s strengths as a singer capable of conveying deep feeling and charisma. “It tells you something about my life,” she says of the slow, languorous ballad. “Listen to my songs and you can understand me. Not necessarily about something that happened today, but the songs are about love, relationships, death… and life in general. On Love Me Now I wanted to capture that feeling you can find in relationships, which is amazing and painful at the same time: It’s going to be awful, it will take me two months to get over it, and yet I still do it.”

Elsewhere the mood shifts on Shadow: it begins as a glamorous, smoky ballad, and heads into heavily rhythmic drum and bass territory halfway through. “What is the essence of the song?” asks Ada. “That, in a long-term relationship, you’re not sleeping with a shadow. Two people can end up on a different page, with their own habits, so sometimes you need to find your rhythm together again.” In a similar vein, the atmospheric We Will Never Be Closer came from a cinematic image Morghe had, of a train leaving and two people being separated. There’s a sadness to it, a sense that romance inevitably brings with it a sense of loss. And Eva, for which Ada plays piano, is about a woman playing with fire.

“The song asks, ‘Eva, how is life in paradise? Playing the tables, hurting men, women, whoever? How is that? Why are you hurting yourself?”

All this comes after Ada Morghe spent the last half decade building up a name as a jazz and soul singer of rare distinction. Having written and starred in the play and film Frau Mutter Tier, and being asked to write songs for its soundtrack, she found herself working with former Prince sound engineer Hans-Martin Buff. That led her to Abbey Road studios in London, her debut album Pictures, and 2020’s Box; an expression of her refusal to be tied down to any one genre or profession. From there came 2023’s Lost, a free-flowing vocal jazz suite based on the four elements, which were represented by her regular musicians: Luca Boscagin on guitar (air), Livingstone Brown on bass (earth), Josh McNasty on drums (fire), Luke Smith on keys (water). Pure Good Vibes, however, pulls her toward what sounds like her most natural album yet: sophisticated jazz and soul that deals with both the romance and reality of matters of the heart.

“Maybe there is a certain quality in my voice: intimate, getting the story across without pushing it,” accepts Ada.

Where did that quality come from? “When I grew up, my father’s classical music tastes dominated. But the one album my mother loved was Diamond Life by Sade,” she says, referring to the 1984 cafe society classic from the Nigerian-born, London-raised, smoky-voiced singer Sade Adu. “Maybe, with this album, I have come back to that. Maybe this is my spiritual home.”