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Up From Punk: A Musical Rebel Who Still Has a Cause
“Writing is what we make from the broth of our experience. If we lead a rich and varied life, we will have a rich and varied stock of ingredients from which to draw on. If we lead a life that is too narrow, too focused, too oriented toward our goals, we will find our writing lacks flavor, is thin on the nutrients that make it both savory and sustaining. Although we tend to think of it as linear, writing is profoundly visual art. Even if we are writing about internal experience, we use images to do it. For this reason, we must consciously and constantly restock our store of images. We do this by focusing on what is around us.”
– Julia Cameron from “The Writer’s Life”
Yasmeen’s “rich and varied” life and song-writing have revolved around finding her identity as an artist, woman, and hyphenated Canadian and now American.
In 2007, Yasmeen completed a sampler CD, Poetry in Motion, which displays her gifts for lyrical and melodic composition on socially aware themes as well as her powerful singing voice, a collection marking the arrival of one of today's most edgy and soulful singer-songwriters.
Filled with catchy hooks and bold messages, sung in her trademark timber and syncopated inflection, the collection ranges from the punk-influenced protest song In San Quentin: A Song For Tookie to several meditations on the turbulence of relationships.
In 2008, Yasmeen created and produced a collection of 8 new songs, and recently completed recording them in simple demo form at the suggestion of a music industry friend. In these new songs, Yasmeen further explores her fascination with personal relationships -- their psychology and dynamics -- from an honest, healthy feminine perspective, one that is both vulnerable and proud:
* In the song Desire's Like Candy a woman (light-heartedly) fights the temptation of involvement with a charismatic cerebral mystery man she is drawn to like catnip;
* That's All Gone is a heartrending meditation on a woman's permanently changed feelings toward a former lover; and
* I'm Gonna Be There gives catchy musical expression to a woman's soulful yearning to be reunited with the man she loves.
These and others on the demo display Yasmeen's priceless gifts for mixing message, melody, mood and syncopated delivery into a moveable feast for the ear, heart, mind and soul.
Like her nickname - Jaz, Yasmeen's songs (wonderously) blend the jazzy-cool hipness of Erykah Badu, the personal honesty of Tracy Chapman, the sultry sound of Sade, the punk attitude of Patti Smith, and the defiant political sensibility of Ani DeFranco.
“Since I grew up hearing arabic grooves – modern and traditional – at home, I naturally gravitate to roots music,” Yasmeen says. “For me blues, gospel, jazz, hip hop, rock, reggae and a lot of Latin American music are founded in African rhythms and drumming.”
Raised with five siblings in the city of Hamilton, Ontario, Yasmeen spent the rest of her
childhood in the town of Aylmer, Quebec, where her family moved when she was 12. “Somehow out of my conservative upbringing and surroundings I evolved into a strong feminist and the family hellion ” she says.
“I am feeling that edge and anger again, and giving voice to it in my music. I don’t do it now the way I used to, or quite the way rappers do today. Now I want to not only howl in protest but be a healer – a world artist with a message of peace and unity of all people.”
Yasmeen discovered her remarkable gift for melody early, and it has never stopped giving. “There’s always melodies in my head,” she says. “That’s the easiest part of song writing for me. Since my mother is a talented percussionist, I find it easy to create melodies to drumbeats. They are a main element in my songs. I’ve emphasized that on my single, In San Quentin: A Song For Tookie, where the African-inflected djembe drumming sets the tone.”
In college, Yasmeen roomed with Erica Meichowsky, a good friend and fellow songwriter who went on to become VJ for Toronto’s Much Music network, under the stage name Erica M..
While at the University of Ottawa, Yasmeen covered the punk scene for her campus radio station, arranging and conducting live interviews with punk bands, and produced a video documentary on the punk movement. She was also cast in a "punk musical" written by theatre classmates, as Patty Poison, the rebellious punk rock daughter of conservative suburbanites. Yasmeen also sang in a local punk band "I enjoyed being the lead singer, the energy was so high and audience response was intense, it allowed me to give outer expression to my 'inner hellion' guess you could call it." Immediately after graduation, Yasmeen went to join friends in New York City where her music career began.
“The punk clubs were in the toughest parts of town" Yasmeen recalls. "Sometimes you would walk down a street and hear gunfire. We had a biker gang in my block in the East Village – ex-cops turned bikers. They never bothered us and we respected them. There were also Guardian Angels in the neighborhood. My friend Geneva, a punk artist/sculptor, introduced me to a few he knew and to founder Curtis Sliwa.”
Yasmeen’s life on the edge in NYC was rough – a couple of times, she had so little money she would get up early to sell subway tokens at the turnstile. But she always stayed productive. “I’d just shut my bedroom door, light candles and incense and focus. No distractions. That’s how I did a lot of my song writing,” she says. Yasmeen fondly remembers the times:
“I always had some kind of legit day job. When I wasn't at home practicing guitar and writing songs, I was in the clubs catching a band or other performers' live shows, sometimes at CBGB's or just chillin' at the neighborhood Pyramid club where friends of mine worked. That’s also where I met Smitty (Patti Smith's little sister Kimberly, Smitty was her nickname). I also went to the A7, a local, small hardcore punk bar before they shut down, and other clubs in the city like the Rock Hotel where I bumped into Andy Warhol at the bar.
Picture me with heavy black eyeliner and red lipstick, wearing black skinny pants, black combat boots, black ripped t-shirt or tank top with a funky dark yellow leather oversize vest over that.
The vest had original graffiti art. It was painted by Geneva who had given me the vest as a gift. On my hands I wore black mesh over which I wore black leather gloves with the fingers cut out on them to expose the mesh. That was me as a lead singer during my punk days. The outer expression of my ‘inner hellion’."
“I went out with H.R., the lead singer of Bad Brains, for a while. He helped me focus on the spiritual side of life more than I was doing at the time. My song-writing improved. They are Washington DC natives who were anti-establishment and hardcore at the same time. Kind of a forerunner of progressive hip-hop. They were more my style than the other strains of punk – my peoples! ”
Yasmeen was also influenced by the vibrant underground hip-hop/rap music that co-existed with the punk sound in the 1980s. The kind of music that addressed the class divide, poverty and police brutality – artists like Grand Master Flash (‘The Message’, ‘New York, New York’), and KRS-One.
“I was in New York at the time the KRS-One track ‘South Bronx’ hit the streets,” Yasmeen recalls. “It was played on the radio. It had an impact in the city, the way Public Enemy and Tupac did several years later. I still listen to progressive hip-hop, artists like Moz Def, Common, Michael Frante, The Coup etc.
“It was two worlds co-existing in one urban/street music scene, and I was into both. We respected each other. Sometimes the two genres even crossed-over. For example, the Beastie Boys, one of our NYC punk bands, went on to record hip-hop that was revolutionary.”
Going from the punk scene – a familiar small underground - to a music career in the ‘real world’ proved difficult. “I met a lot of characters on the fringes of the record business," Yasmeen explains. "Amateur ‘producers’, traducers, exploiters, opportunists – ‘the ususal suspects’ – mostly evil men! I fell into some traps, but emerged even stronger. Eventually, I learned that dark circumstances can be transcended. That’s what my song After The Storm is about.”
Through it all Yasmeen never stopped composing songs, using her unique talent for melody and poetry set to music. Her song writing subjects over the years have ranged from punk-influenced protest songs to the turbulence of relationships. “It’s like Bob Marley says: ‘so much trouble in the world...’, especially for we women,” she says. In the soulful, exotic Bounds of My Love for example, Yasmeen describes a dreamy, by-the-sea tableau of missing someone, and nature's beauty is reminding her of it.
Yasmeen produced and arranged the songs on her sampler CD with keyboard and guitar player Scott Baldyga, a former bandmate of Ziggy Marley. Backed by talented session players Taki (on bass and guitar), Chris Rice (on saxaphone and flute), Rock Deadrick (on djembe and conga) and Bruce Zelesnik (on udu). The songs showcase Yasmeen’s unique combination of soulful melodies, poetic lyrics and vocal power.
If it is true that poetry is strong emotion recollected in tranquility, and that the best songs are written, in Stevie Wonder’s phrase, in the “key of life” Yasmeen's songs are truly “poetry in motion.”