May 26, 2026 11:08 AM
Sonny Rollins Passes Away at 95
Sonny Rollins, the iconic saxophonist, composer and improviser whose career stretched from the origins of bebop to 21st…
“I really wanted to make a record that’s something you can, like, put in your car and drive and have a story,” says Dida Pelled.
(Photo: Dvir Kahlon)It is not always definitive or eliminating to judge an artist by their discography. In the case of the multidirectional Dida Pelled, the guitarist-singer (not singer-guitarist) has released a set of five albums over the past 15 years, revealing a naturally wandering yet clearly talented creative soul at work.
On her latest album, I Wish You Would, Pelled presents an alluring personal way with the blues. But on her previous album, 2022’s thrilling and surprising Love Of The Tiger, she cuts the image of a singer-songwriter with a fresh edge. That persona is seemingly a world away from her strongly jazz-driven debut Dida Sings And Plays, from 2011.
No, Pelled’s recording career is not a case study in multi-personality syndrome, but the natural moves of a modern artist whose taste antenna channels a diversity of influences and interests.
Asked about her adventure into the blues orbit, in a recent Zoom interview from Los Angeles, Pelled replied, “Honestly, everything I play is very bluesy,” clarifying that “this is the first one where I sing and play blues.”
Recalling the salad days of her recording life, she notes, “I made two jazz records earlier in my career when I’d just arrived in New York. Fabio Morgera, a great Italian trumpet player and producer, found me at a gig in West Village — my first gig in New York. He came three times in a row, sat in and offered me this record deal. I was very lucky. I had Roy Hargrove and Gregory Hutchinson on it. It kind of happened by chance. I didn’t even know what it means to make a record.
“I was in the first semester at the New School. I only cared about, ‘What’s my next solo gonna’sound like?’ It was very much just thinking about your playing, in a way, not thinking about a concept for an album. I just played tunes I liked to play. He told me, ‘You’re gonna go in different directions. You should record how you sound playing straightahead jazz now, because you do it so well. People will always wanna go back to that. And it will be nice for you to document that.’”
Jumping to the now, she says, “So this is my first singing and playing, basically the way I sound on gigs or these days. Many of these songs are things I’ve been playing for many years, which for some reason I never recorded. Finding songs is very special: It’s kind of like writing a song. It comes to you and you think, ‘My God, I wanna do this song.’ I feel like I have this connection with it. When I thought about the record, it made sense to me to bring them together. It feels like a coherent whole to me. I have to give some credit to [producer] Matt [Pierson]. I think he’s very good at big picture and that’s one of the reasons I was excited to work with him.
“I really wanted to make a record that’s something you can, like, put in your car and drive and have a story. And that’s Matt’s expertise. So many records are kind of all over the place. I love those, and feel like they find a way to make it work. But I was excited to make a record that really takes you on one ride.”
She is in good company on the album, with the dream (and sometimes dreamy) team of bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wolleson for a rhythm section, and current go-to pianist (and occasionally Rhodes player) Sullivan Fortner on some tracks. “Sullivan is so good,” Pelled says. “I go to hear him every possible chance I have. He is definitely one of my favorites. And then there were Tony and Kenny. I was a fan of Tony for years.
“After I moved to New York, I was a jazz girl, coming to the New School, and I quickly found this scene of jazz musicians that are — I think you can call them jazz dropouts, who play other things, too. They play songs with singer-songwriters and play folky, rocky, bluesy things, but definitely coming from jazz.”
Such a broad-spirited approach to music is evident in her I Wish You Would, a “blues” record in a general and eclectic way, with shadings based on her personal musical proclivities. Her musical voice ranges from a jazz-inflected treatment of “Since I Fell For You” to a lanky-grooving, Billie Holiday-flavored touch on the Hot Tuna-associated “Hesitation Blues” (with Fortner’s piano suavity) and nods to John Lee Hooker and Billy Boy Arnold. The song set closes on an intimate note, with just voice and guitar on “Trouble,” a tune written by Gladys Shelley and recorded by Dakota Staton. Scherr, who had played the song with Station, turned Pelled on to it, and that’s actually Scherr on the jazz-guitar-through-vibrato-toned-amp on the track.
Pelled also inculdes a version of a song by famed jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, “Rosa Mae,” connected to an ambitious ongoing project of Pelled’s, “The Lost Women of Song,” which she has performed at Barbes in Brooklyn and elsewhere, and plans to one day commit to record. Among the women in the spotlight are Connie Converse, Elizabeth Cotten, Vashti Bunyan, Tia Blake, Molly Drake (Nick Drake’s mother) and Norma Tanega. Williams, Pelled pointed out, “is not unknown at all, but I wanted to play her song and it made sense in the project. You can find her doing it, here and there, but it feels like it’s under the category of ‘Lost Things.’”
Another “Lost Things” qualifier is “I Wish I Was A Single Girl Again,” which will be the title of her forthcoming “Americana” album, recorded with the same collaborators at the same time as her recently released project.
The “Lost Women of Song” project, she explains, “is about women that wrote gorgeous music. They’re kind of iconic, but never made a record, only had demos of their songs released after they passed. I found more women that either had one record or never did a record and had really interesting stories.”
Growing up in Tel Aviv, before following her heart and fate to New York, Pelled admits, “I was definitely a guitar nerd first. I started playing at 11 years old and only played guitar. At that age, I wasn’t a serious musician. I was playing Nirvana’s [live album] MTV Unplugged In New York. I would sing along, but wasn’t thinking of myself as a singer.
“At 15, I got into this really amazing high school with a great jazz program, and there I got very nerdy and quickly was obsessed with bebop and hard-bop. I was transcribing Wes Montgomery and Grant Green all day long. From 15 to 18, I was becoming a bebop and hard-bop player. That was very important, because I felt I needed that focus in order to get the language and to understand this music. You have to kind of be obsessed for a while to really get it.
“After 18 or 19, I started wanting to sing, which came with the love of other styles, not thinking I wanted to sing standards, but to sing whatever. I was very passionate about wanting to sing.” Eventually, after studying voice and mustering courage, she began to sing in public, and “it really was like coming out of the closet.”
In effect, ironically, she was able to reinvent herself once landing in New York, “which sounds crazy because the craziest musicians are here, and I was able to say, ‘Hey, I’m Dida. I play guitar and sing.’”
Since 2020, Pelled has channeled her music community-connecting instincts into radio, with The Dida Show, every Friday afternoon on Radio Free Brooklyn, and broadcast to the world via YouTube. Guests, to date, include Cécile McLorin Salvant, Ben Monder and Arooj Aftab, as well as upcoming names of note: One tasty show finds her conversing and jamming with one of her favorite young guitarists, Emmanuel Michael.
Pelled, never one to sit still, or in one place, has other projects in the hopper, including what involves “crazy avant-garde stuff — I went all the way with it,” she comments. “I have to release it, also, I dunno, before I’m 40, because It’s super experimental and wild. And I feel like it’ll be weird to release it when I’m like too old.” She laughs.
She is also nearly finished with a vaguely rock-themed album called Teen Model, in collaboration with (former teen model) Jenna Danneberger, which she describes as “a coming-of-age record about both of us in our 20s in New York, and addiction and love and everything you can imagine. That’s a very special record to me, and I’m excited to release it.”
As for the pesky gender question, regarding the slow but sure acceptance of women artists in a once male-dominated jazz world, Pelled, 37, is a female jazz-veteran-in-training. As one on the scene for 15 years, she has witnessed — and benefited from — the gradual thawing of old gender-based strictures in jazz.
“I’m always happy when more women get to do their thing. Women are the best,” she laughs. “I don’t like to separate too much. I love men playing music and women, and whatever is good is good. But there’s something about women playing and singing that’s very delicate and speaks to me. But I can say the same thing about men whose music l love. There is like a bro-ey kind of playing that really doesn’t do anything too much for me. But everyone should get an opportunity to do it.
“Again, I don’t like to separate so much, but I do have an obsession with ‘The Lost Women of Song’ stuff, where I’m really connected to women’s voices and storytelling and the way they write songs and play them.” DB
Onstage, Rollins would move about restlessly, thrusting his tenor sax in the air as he blew.
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