Oct 28, 2025 10:47 AM
In Memoriam: Jack DeJohnette, 1942–2025
Jack DeJohnette, a bold and resourceful drummer and NEA Jazz Master who forged a unique vocabulary on the kit over his…
“None of us gets to go through this life without some kinds of loss,” says Nnenna Freelon of her memoir about the death of her husband, sister and even the family dog.
(Photo: Tanishia Walker)Loss is too gentle a word for the understanding of death, for the fullness of its destruction. Its injustices. Six years ago, singer Nnenna Freelon fell into cosmic shock when Phil, her husband of 40 years, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), followed in quick succession by the deaths of her baby sister, Debbie, and her beloved dog Basie. “It was as if there was a breaking, an eruption,” she said. “Everywhere I looked for comfort and for solace was gone. It seemed like the most cruel trick.”
In the hours after Phil’s death, Freelon entered a new reality she never asked for and couldn’t accept. Not at first. Not for a long time. Like so many people experiencing deep, decimating grief, she walled off the world, tightened into a ball and resisted. She felt estranged from herself and the life she knew, ghost-like in the way she moved or didn’t move through her days. She was grief sick. And she wanted to remain locked inside herself until gradually — finally — she didn’t.
“The resistance is, ‘I am not. I cannot. I will not. No.’” said Freelon. “It is the visceral ‘Noooooooooo!’ … Or some people say, ‘Oh, hell no.’ It’s like, ‘No, I am not dealing with this. I do not want this to be true. I do not want this to be my story. No.’ And I think it’s fine to be there. You will decide how long you want to sit in your ‘no.’ I started to feel less and less OK curled up in the worry ball — shaking my head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, my jaw tight. That mode of being — grunting, just urrrgggh — that is unsustainable.”
But what could she do, really? She couldn’t read because she couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t sing because she was terrified of how changed she’d sound: of the seismic difference between the before-Nnenna and the after-Nnenna. But Freelon was grieving in the middle of lockdown with nothing but time on her hands. So she took them and started them writing.
“It was a really hard time,” she said. “But at the same time, COVID offered me a quality of time where I could write music and words and be unbothered.” And over months and months of writing within her grief, something happened as unexpected as it was anointing: “[Writing] became the thing that saved my life.”
Set for release Oct. 21, Beneath the Skin of Sorrow: Improvisations on Loss (Duke University Press) documents Freelon’s communion with grief in the months and years following Phil’s death. Despite her tight grip on the last vestiges of her known world, she found she could let go. Just a little. And when she did, she began improvising with the unknown. “I thought that perhaps the jazz musician in me was well equipped to deal with this life-altering moment,” she said. “Grief was saying, ‘You must modulate. You must slow the tempo. You must change the key.’ And those were the metaphors and the tools that came to me because they were the available ones.”
Initially, Freelon felt daunted by the task of authoring a memoir. Having never written more than diary entries, she wondered how to organize her writing while preserving its dualities and chance-ness. Some days her writing manifested as an essay; other days, a poem. She wrote short stories, vignettes, even recipes. “At first, I didn’t realize that they could all coexist because I hadn’t really seen a book like that,” she said. “And my improvisational mind — my improvisational spirit — said, ‘Well of course, dear, you can do that.’”
Once she had what would become her manuscript in hand, she knelt on the floor with pages all around her and got to work. “I organized them in accordance with their vibration, their color, their feeling, their essence.” From this process emerged individual “containers,” later titled “’Round Midnight,” “Stolen Moments,” “A Love Supreme” and “Time Traveler.” These containers share Freelon’s sinking anguishes but also her revelations, particularly — and especially as a career improviser — that it was OK, even freeing, not to know.
“Releasing the need to know little by little, I stumbled across familiar feelings that at first I didn’t quite recognize. … I didn’t immediately make the connection that deep mourning was calling me to a kind of improvisatory play. I was being invited to dance with my grief. Was this possible?” she wrote in the book.
Once she let go her clenching, Freelon allowed her grieving to open new portals. The love she shared with Phil, her soul mate, transcended death. She began experiencing, viscerally, what had always been around her but took a monumental shift in perspective for her to start noticing. She observed the path of a determined turtle in her driveway, unexpected rose blooms and, yes, the ants and their stick.
“Maybe it was my imagination, but it seems like they were curious: ‘Can we go over this thing? Around? Through it?’” she wrote. “They finally (most of them anyway) decided to go around and resumed the path they’d been on before. Grief bade me notice these little ants. … It almost seemed like they’d been waiting to be seen.”
Freelon’s path to publishing included a detour through the recording studio in June 2024. Released in March, Beneath The Skin (Origin Records) serves as a musical companion that reflects the vulnerability and ambition of the memoir, presenting 10 songs — nine of which are Freelon’s original compositions — in honor and celebration of great love and great grief. “This is a book meant to be sung. And the record is meant to be experienced with words,” she said. Some songs are brand new; others, renewed. She wrote the album’s anthemic modal tune “Changed” more than three decades earlier.
“Sometimes you actually write yourself into the future,” she said. “When I wrote the song, I had no idea that the lyric would make this big circle of understanding so that I felt it in a different way. … With the human that I am now, it has an interiority that it didn’t have then. It has a life experience so that I can sing it from the root of my lived experience in a different way. And I hope it reaches people’s spirits in a different way as well.” Currently, she’s producing an audiobook that intercuts the songs from the recording with the text.
During the memoir’s editing process, an early reader delivered a note that Freelon hadn’t presented clear, concrete evidence that grief and improvisation can coexist. Her response? “That’s not this book. I am not trying to make a case for this in that way. I am showing you, by the mere fact that I could even write this book, that grief and improvisation can live together. It is its own evidence.” Had she integrated that feedback in a rewrite, the resulting book may have teetered a little too close to the edge of self-help. “This is absolutely not a self-help book.”
What the memoir isn’t is less important than what it is: a deeply personal reflection that invites a universal connection. “None of us gets to go through this life without some kinds of loss,” said Freelon. “I’m hoping that peeling back the layers of the onion on my experience, in an authentic way, I can maybe pull the curtain back a little for other people to say, ‘Yeah, me too.’ There’s a pure, cool spring somewhere beneath the skin of it all, where we can all drink and be refreshed. We got to get to it, though.” DB
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