A LETTER TO LISTENER’S OF SEVEN LETTERS.
Lithuania, the country Viktorija called home for long, is approximately seven thousand kilometers away from New York. This seems like a strange thought exercise, but for someone who has known Viktorija since her first day as a graduate student in Berklee College of Music over a decade year ago, it is important to understand how far away she was from New York, the city of Village Vanguard, of Blue Note, of Birdland, Apollo. You could easily fit 25 Lithuanias in the space between her birth country and New York, but Viktorija chose to devote herself to what we often call jazz a long time ago, and she hasn’t looked away from that choice since. Once, I hadn’t heard from Viktorija for months, but I got a call— would I look at the words of this song? She wasn’t sure if the grammar made sense? It sounds like you, it makes perfect sense to me, I’d say. What many take for granted took Viktorija concerted effort to gain closeness to. Why write in English, or sing jazz?, I’d ask her: Is it so more people can hear you? No, she responded. I just have to. It is just what feels right for me now to express myself. Her voice rings with clarity as she responds. The music you hear would have taken any music student a while to understand and write— but for Viktorija, it is the fruit of even more devotion. Gentler things that the listener may take for granted took her years of careful devotion. English, grammar. Fit twenty five countries between her and New York. She does it anyway. It is what feels right. She just has to.
A LETTER FOR THE FIRST SONG.
This isn’t to say she is a fanatical purist in her devotion to the genre. Listen closely, and we can hear so many worlds worlds Viktorija has passed through just in the first four chords in STRANGER, her first track from SEVEN LETTERS. I hear her life in Spain now, where she teaches at the same school we once were students. I hear a life closely informed by the music of the Mediterranean, of flamenco, of the music of Greece (the home country of her her co- producer, Petros Klampanis). But by the time she starts singing, you’re reminded that Viktorija always comes back to rooting herself in her adopted home, to the grammar of jazz. She sings in STRANGER, “Stranger / come here / I’ve been looking for you / I’ve been seeing your love so clear / years and years passing.” In a hand-written note, she says this song is ‘a letter to a stranger.’ I wonder, as I hear this song, if Viktorija is speaking to a person. I wonder if she is speaking to a language like English, which takes her twice the concentrated effort to write her poetry in. I wonder if she is singing to the genre of jazz.
“Years and years passing and our love keeps lasting. / Do you also feel me?”
A LETTER FOR THE SECOND SONG.
She won’t like me telling you this story, but this is what you get when you ask a friend to write letters on your behalf. Years ago, Viktorija and I took an ensemble with the master Spanish saxophonist Perico Sambeat. He had us all singing a folk song from the desert, and Viktorija— who had come to learn jazz— wasn’t able to hide her discomfort. To her great relief, he dismissed her from her ensemble duties, wryly asking her: “I’m not sure Sarah Vaughn needs to be in this ensemble. Do you?” At first, Viktorija took it as an acknowledgement of her devotion to jazz, as proof of her practice’s clarity. Within months, Viktorija would eventually take private lessons with Perico, and her heart would break. “I understand,” she said once by the river. “I didn’t understand who Perico was, what he was doing. But every second I have learnt from him has already changed me.” When I say she is not a fanatical genre-purist, it is because she has learnt how not to be from elders of the genre itself, like Perico. Perico, with his kind eyes, his constant support, his understated smile but stunning presence and brilliance, now joins Viktorija as a peer on her second track MOTHER. Perico walks with us into a room Viktorija has her mother in: “iris windows / pale blue opening / the love fills my room / and it’s you.” Viktorija, says in clear language, a letter we all wish we could sing to our Mother: “You’re the light sudden bright / But when I look deeper / A sad symphony of winter / Reveals all you hide / how you’ve tried.” A song pours from her heart, her heart pours out in song. Perico is standing by her, still smiling. Petros plays a solo on double bass with a soft precision, Albert Palau— who has been playing with her since her first days in Spain— dances around Petros like snowflakes in a snow-globe your mom bought on a vacation she took years ago. Like all great teachers, Perico still has the last say. He holds us until the end. It isn’t Sarah Vaughan singing. It is Viktorija. And how grateful I am that it is her, and nobody else.
A LETTER FOR THE THIRD SONG.
My first ever song in English that I would perform, if I remember correctly, was Johny Mercer jazz standard “Skylark.” Like Viktorija, I had to, too. I had to pay my way through graduate school, and I had invitations to sing at jazz clubs before I understood what it was. Viktorija would tell me as I began singing— “the beauty of this music is that you are not performing. Sing as if... you are speaking to someone. Speak to the bird,” she said. Speak to the bird. Sing as if you are speaking. The next time I sang “Skylark,” I spoke to the bird. In her third song, Viktorija is speaking to a LONELY BIRD. We hear her collaborators breathe more; Quique Ramirez opens the song like a bird jumping from place to place, Albert enters like gentle sun-filled breeze. And then you hear her, a simple sigh, speaking to the bird: “Here we go again / in our empty home.” She keeps singing to the bird, with curious vocal trills that at first listen feel slightly out of place with her preference for clear notes— until you hear the band follow her trills, and suddenly you hear the language of birds in all of their playing. Like a true poet, she somehow holds both the bird and its absence in her music.
A LETTER FOR THE FOURTH SONG.
Her fourth song, SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE, is a letter to herself. It takes only a few seconds for you to understand how hard Viktorija can be on herself: the rhythm is unrelenting, her voice strained with an urgency that she only subjects herself to, the song a stark contrast from the letter to her mother, for a stranger, a bird. She has not written a ballad for herself. For herself, Viktorija has a stern letter: “we’re in, in so deep, playing games / and aiming for mountains too steep / no rules, no control, no gravity / confused, still you stay / playing games you never intended to play / illusions of rules, unspoken / you win or you lose / you will get a prize you can’t choose / and it looks like you will play / for all of your life.” It reminds of a song-game I once wrote-played called “El Juego” with a Brazilian bassist named Munir Hossn, where we fit as many syllables as possible into an invitation to play with each other— like “el juego" you hear the labor of being in the game, but you hear the sheer pleasure of playing it, too. You hear Quique, you hear Albert, you hear Petros, you hear Viktorija, and you hear them end the song-game at the exact same moment with the precision of a clock that rings to mark the end of school: sudden, sharp, precise, but familiar nonetheless. As a friend, I want to tell her to be easier on herself. As a musician, I listen and smile.
A LETTER FOR THE FIFTH SONG.
She doesn’t ease just yet on her fifth song, A CALL FROM THE FUTURE. But she is easier to everything that isn’t herself. Her voice carries less tension, but still moves with purpose, as she walks towards this letter to the future. She writes what we all wonder now, a summer where the world is at the brink of war again: “They say you’re there. I don’t see you, I don’t feel you. Give me a call / let me hear / a something called peace.” Like a brusque evening walk, it opens with a steady pace, until it slows just for a moment while just Petros, Quique and Albert wander, until Viktorija catches up to them again, and starts walking everyone brusquely again. We may not know what future she is walking towards, but we see her walking nonetheless in this song to hand-deliver the letter. I want to tell her we are here, she doesn’t need to walk so quickly towards this future. But I understand. Sometimes, she just has to do some things. I believe she will deliver it. And I don’t think she will have the peace she deserves until she does, so we let her walk into the night.
A LETTER FOR THE SIXTH SONG.
Viktorija, devotee of the music often called jazz, would not write a collection of letters to the world without including one to the standards. Ten years ago, her re-working of Miles Davis’s “Four” was so popular among us as students that students would randomly burst out into the peculiar syncopation of her arrangement— one that was so crystal clear that I can still hear it in my mind, years later. Some of her songs tend to stay with you like this, like her song “Nica’s Blues,” an earlier song from years prior. The rhythm of that song remains in my mind, too. But in her sixth song, you hear the morning sun rise slowly after a stormy night: Viktorija, now older and less eager or pre-occupied with showing something to the world, goes to a quieter pace that we all know only with age. As she sings, look outside the windows, and you’ll see AUTUMN LEAVES falling, as Viktorija sings her sixth letter, a letter to Johny Mercer. Quique and Petros become the leaves falling, blowing in the wind, tumbleweed. Albert becomes the sun streaming through the leaves. Viktorija is on a bench in New York, in Central Park, wearing a scarf as the leaves fall. Somewhere near here, Johny Mercer is smoking a cigarette and smiling.
A LETTER FOR THE SEVENTH SONG.
Years have passed since Viktorija called me asking if the grammar made sense. The grammar is now soft clay in her hands, both in her closeness to it, but also in her ease in holding her own form: the music of a Lithuanian who found jazz as a young woman, and couldn’t let go of it since. Her grasp of it is devoted, and the form is slowly warming in her hands. If you found this record, go back in time and start with her first, Nica’s Blues. Move on to Stories, and then to The Only Light. Come to Skybridges, and then come back to these seven letters. You will hear her gently become who she is today, bearing everything with the elegance that only age brings: her honesty, her broken heart, her loneliness, her aching, her constant searching, her devotion, the room where her mother is in her heart, the room where the bird has left, the room where she studied Johny Mercer for years, the room she will go back home to today, where her husband— my once roommate, Gus— will welcome her for dinner after a
long day teaching at Berklee.
ON THE EDGE OF SILENCE has nearly a syllable each note, as she finds a comfortable balance between the frantic pace in which she sternly speaks to herself and the pained slowness where she writes to people she loves. Here, you hear an assured Viktorija. In the lyrics of this final letter— a letter to musicians and music lovers— you hear wisps of all the letters she had written, but with a synthesized optimism: the bird may “fly / embrace / detach / and then so instantly drop” but still she accepts that she’ll be “excited to go back on top.” The same game she wearily called an illusion before, she now sings is “sacred game / inside of music’s clay for life.” As she sings, she smiles, “here, here’s my cue! Count it off to create anew.” Earlier, where she sang, pained, to herself “no one’s here to help you,” she sings now “and when it’s time to go, we do / we’re one, as a band, as a tribe.” “Like a beating heart / pumps our blood,” she sings. I smile, I want to tell her that her heart— Lithuanian, far from New York, is the same human heart that beats in the hallowed halls of the New York jazz clubs she once wistfully spoke of.
A LETTER TO VIKTORIJA.
Viktorija, I write this letter to your listeners as much as I write it to you. You said once, when we were much younger, that you needed jazz. And this is true: nobody picks this life of being a musician unless we need music as if our lives depend on it. But my friend, my sister, the one who told me how to sing-speak to birds, This music needs you to. May your travels be blessed. I look forward to your next album.
Ganavya