SYLVIA BROOKS Finds What Lives Beneath the Surface on 'Soliloquy'
Sylvia Brooks has an uncanny gift for pausing over the seemingly ordinary and discovering something deeper, more meaningful and extraordinary. A museum exhibition, a child dancing onstage, a television drama or a hymn she hears in an unexpected place can suddenly open a powerful conduit for her creativity. Often, she doesn’t immediately understand why a particular moment has touched her. She simply knows that it has, and that feeling becomes a mysterious impulse she needs to explore. When that response resonates deeply enough, she transforms it into purposeful music.
That instinct is at the heart of Soliloquy, the multi-talented singer/songwriter’s sixth studio album and perhaps her most revealing artistic statement. Its guiding phrase, “Music finding its way to what lives underneath,” captures the aesthetic of both the eight-track repertoire and her thoughtful, heartfelt process behind its creation. Her dominant themes include love, deception, desire, courage, loss and fragility, but she approaches those ideas through characters in sharply observed scenes rather than broad declarations.
“I’m not always sure what it is that moves me,” Sylvia explains. “I’ll be out and about and something I see or hear will stop me in my tracks - and I don’t always grasp why I have the emotional reaction I have. I think that’s part of what this record is about. I’m trying to give a voice to the fragility that lies underneath, the things that people don’t necessarily want to or don’t have the courage to look into deeper. I try to create a story that will make people feel, hoping to illuminate emotions that may already be there, waiting to be recognized.”
That process is vividly illustrated by “A Letter to Sophie,” inspired by French conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself, which Sylvia encountered at the Getty Museum. Calle’s work grew from a breakup letter she received from a former lover, which she gave to women from different professions to analyze and interpret. Sylvia became fascinated by the gulf between the letter’s detached language and the pain it represented, imagining her musical story around the woman receiving such a message.
The song unfolds like a short film. A lyrical soprano entrance and piano establish the setting before Sylvia settles into an intimate jazz ballad, accompanied by elegant piano and subtle acoustic guitar. Her imagery is tactile: a hotel room, a tattered napkin, cigarette smoke, decaying lilacs and light falling through cracks. Rather than announcing the heartbreak, she allows those details to accumulate until the betrayal becomes palpable.
The singer’s storytelling was influenced by Leonard Cohen’s ability to use imagery that asks listeners to participate in the narrative. “I love Leonard Cohen because he goes to such deep places, and his lyrics are not obvious,” Sylvia says. “I love the way he juxtaposes images and gives you greatness that makes you stop for a second and think about it. With ‘A Letter to Sophie,’ I wanted those images to paint the picture of what was happening rather than simply tell you what was happening. Christian understood that immediately. He heard the depth of the feeling and created magic around it that allowed me to stay inside that private encounter.”
“Christian” is pianist, arranger and longtime collaborator Christian Jacob, whose relationship with Sylvia has developed across several projects. He contributed arrangements to The Arrangement, collaborated with her as a songwriter on Signature, and on Soliloquy serves as arranger, co-producer and pianist. He also wrote the melody for “A Letter to Sophie.”
“I’ll send a lyric and he’ll know where to go with it,” Sylvia says. “We have developed a language together. We get each other. I love working with Christian because I trust him, not only as a musician but as a human being. He has this exquisite sensibility, and when he shares a musical idea with me, I hear what he’s playing and it takes me somewhere. Our intuitive collaborative process gets better every time we work together.”
The theatrical quality of “A Letter to Sophie” is hardly accidental. Before becoming a professional jazz vocalist, Sylvia studied classical acting at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, immersing herself in Shakespeare, Shaw, Tennessee Williams and Chekhov. She also studied with acting teacher Ivana Chubbuck. That training continues to shape the way she approaches a song. For Sylvia, technical preparation eventually has to disappear.
“When I work on a song, I first have to get it into my voice and understand what the physical demands are, what the high notes need, what the technique needs to be,” she says. “Then I let that go when I get into the studio. It’s the same thing I learned as an actor. You do all the work beforehand, and then you show up and let yourself be fully present. That’s what I hear from great musicians like Miles Davis and Chet Baker. They can be completely in the moment because they’ve done the work.”
That philosophy reaches a particularly moving destination in “Lizzie’s Dance,” which began when Sylvia attended an eight-year-old girl’s recital. One child in the troupe seemed to be moving differently from the others as if existing in a private separate space. Looking closely at her face, Sylvia realized the girl had Down syndrome. What initially appeared to be awkwardness gradually became an uninhibited performance by a child unconcerned with conforming to everyone else’s choreography.
Sylvia created the name Lizzie and built the song around both the girl’s experience and her changing perception. It opens with smoky saxophone, meditative piano and soft brushes as Sylvia observes Lizzie from the outside. Then, at “Lizzie’s my name,” the musical perspective changes. Bass and drums move into a buoyant waltz, the piano becomes playful, and Sylvia begins singing in the first person. A shimmering saxophone passage develops into increasingly energetic improvisation.
“I wanted to relay her unique expressions and motion from her point of view, but I also wanted to be the narrator and talk about the journey I traveled,” Sylvia says. “The more I watched her, the more I realized that what I initially thought was her limitation wasn’t what I was really seeing. She was magnificent. She had her own rhythm and her own way of moving through the world. I wanted the song to communicate that dignity and courage rather than make her an object of observation.”
The album’s expressive range is equally apparent in “Soul Eyes,” Sylvia’s interpretation of Mal Waldron’s atmospheric jazz classic. Elegant piano, subtle bass and brushed drums leave considerable space around her voice. She moves from hushed lower tones to airy upper phrases as the song’s questions about love and deception unfold. It is an understated showcase for the lyric-centered approach that defines much of Soliloquy.
“I’m not trying to do a lot of vocal mechanics or scatting just to demonstrate that I can,” Sylvia explains. “For me, it’s about conveying the message. If I can sing a song in a way that makes somebody hear the words as though they’re hearing them for the first time, even if they’ve heard the song many times before, then I’m doing my job. I’m not a classic jazz singer in the sense that I’m trying to fit into somebody else’s idea of what a jazz vocalist is supposed to be. This is where I live.”
“Talks a Good Game,” one of Sylvia’s originals co-written with Jacob and Tone Scott, provides a mischievous counterpoint. A darker piano vamp and plucked upright bass introduce a swaggering character who breezes through a room as if he owns it. Sylvia’s phrasing is quick, witty and coquettish, while the groove shifts into swing as she artfully punctures his self-important image. Her “tinfoil crown” becomes a sly symbol of a man whose confidence far exceeds his substance.
“Temptation,” Tom Waits’ bluesy composition, reveals another side of her artistry. She wanted its vibe to be raw and funky, while Jacob heard the song’s underlying metaphor—a dangerous bargain with the devil—and gave the arrangement an element of slyness. Piano drives the groove, Sylvia becomes a sensual blues chanteuse, and Grant Geissman’s electric guitar eventually erupts into the emphatic, deeply soulful performance. “Ironically, Christian didn’t initially like the song when I brought it to him,” Sylvia recalls. “But he tapped into the thematic current underneath it—the idea of temptation and making a deal with the devil, and the fact that the devil is tricky. I wanted to sing it raw and make it as bluesy as possible, and he brought in this playful quality that I hadn’t expected.”
The partnership between Sylvia and Jacob had already produced another important chapter before Soliloquy. Their live album, Sylvia Sylvia Live with Christian Jacob, captured them at Vibrato in Los Angeles. Around the same period, Sylvia released “Amazing Grace” as a standalone single, following an extraordinary encounter at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York.
While visiting the memorial during a trip to the Jazz Congress, Sylvia heard a faint “Amazing Grace” echoing through the space. She immediately knew she wanted to record the hymn, but envisioned an arrangement far removed from a conventional reading. She asked Grammy-winning arranger John Beasley to create an arrangement that could evoke both the souls lost at the site and the physical devastation left behind. Beasley’s treatment begins with spacious piano and Sylvia’s wordless vocals before gathering weight through bass clarinet, cello, acoustic bass and percussion. The music eventually pushes into intense improvisational territory before retreating toward its contemplative center. The lifechanging session stayed with Sylvia and helped propel her toward the deeper artistic investigation that became Soliloquy.
The roots of that exploration reach back to Sylvia’s childhood. Her father, pianist and arranger Don Ippolito, worked with artists including Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan and Buddy Rich and wrote for his own octet and big band. Her mother, Johanna Dordick, was an opera singer who later performed popular music and standards before founding the Los Angeles Opera Theater. Yet Sylvia initially resisted becoming a musician. She wanted to do theater and was drawn to Shakespeare and the great dramatic writers. It wasn’t until her father’s death, while sorting through his compositions and arrangements for his funeral, that she began reconsidering the music that had surrounded her all her life.
“I just felt like it was time,” she says. “When I was younger, I wanted to be serious about acting. I wanted Shakespeare and Chekhov and Tennessee Williams. But after my father died, I realized that music was all of that plus more. When you do a Shakespeare soliloquy, so much of the language is about breath, rhythm and how you use your voice. Music contains all of that, and then it gives you another dimension.”
That connection makes the title Soliloquy particularly resonant. The theatrical term refers to an innermost thought spoken aloud, and Sylvia’s songs often function in precisely that fashion. Some emerge from her personal experiences, others from characters she has imagined, and still others from compositions she has chosen because she found an intimate doorway into them.
On Sting’s “Fragile,” for example, Sylvia draws on difficult relationships in her life rather than treating the familiar song as an abstract meditation. Jacob surrounds her with piano, acoustic guitar, percussion and choir, while Geissman’s guitar gradually expands the arrangement into cinematic excitement. “Whenever I work on a particular song, I try to find the inner connection for me,” she says. “Why did this character make me want to put the story out into the world? That’s my acting training.”
For an artist who spent years studying how to inhabit the words of Shakespeare and other playwrights, Soliloquy represents a remarkable convergence. The jazz she inherited from her father, the theatrical language she discovered through classical acting, the songwriting voice she has developed over successive albums and the observational instinct that keeps sending her back to the world around her have finally become parts of the same creative vocabulary.
And that may be the real significance of “what lives underneath.” Sylvia isn’t simply inviting her characters to reveal themselves. She is also listening for why their stories have found her, then trusting what she discovers to resonate with her listeners.
For information on Sylvia's Soliloquy release concert at DROM in New York City on October 4, 2026, please visit: Sylvia Brooks Soliloquy Release Concert - Dromnyc.com
Comments