A friend and colleague of mine, Sandy Kendall, wrote this wonderful review of Iyeoka’s performance at Wellesley last Thursday (it is an aspiration of mine to one day write as beautifully as she!)
I know you weren’t able to get to the concert last night; just thought I’d fill you in. Iyeoka was delightful–such a charming and positive presence and what a voice! Backed up by two talented guys on saxophone and various percussion (and impressive whistling), the sound was fantastic for a full house in the Multifaith Center.
The show was part of her “When Women Were Drummers” project (I might have that title slightly askew, but it was very like that), which was a slight departure from her YouTube video on Wellesley’s website. Less pop, more Africa. Felt a bit like an evening’s visit to her parents’ native Nigeria. She can sing and narrate in perfect accents of that second home of hers, and yet telling her self-effacing own how-I-got-here story, her native Boston sound rings true too.
Do you know her story?
After seven years at Northeastern University and a stable career as a registered pharmacist, she took a less (oh dear, pardon me) prescribed path…into poetry. And its cousin, music. Hard to imagine her big smooth vocals and tumbling poetry riffs stuck for always behind a compounding desk. A good decision!
Still she only finally hung up her lab coat in 2010. She also became a TED Fellow that year, pretty impressive. Around that time, too, I gather, she started learning the language of which her parents speak a dialect–Ishan, or Esan.
Old proverbs are helping her learn, and she’s turned them into hypnotic chants and songs. They made up a good portion of last night’s performance, and their rhythms are lodged in my mind though the unfamiliar words escape me. One lesson from the old country?
She who is being deloused
Should not lose her temper
Even when
Her hair is being pulled.
Well, who could argue? But Iyeoka asks, Hmmm, maybe, if we open our minds, the advice can go farther. That last break-up perhaps…?
I hope she’ll be back at Wellesley soon! And with active TED work, presentations at conferences and retreats, plus a new CD and a song taken up as theme song for a USA Network series, I’m sure we’ll see more of her somewhere.
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