From Max Roach and Oscar Brown’s We Insist! to Nina Simone’s Emergency Ward, with recordings from albums from Nellie McKay, Melvin Van Peebles, Bob Dorough and Amanda Ekery sandwiched in and around them, jazz has been a force for wry social commentary as much as rock, soul and folk.
Then there’s singer-pianist-composer Dara Starr Tucker, whose incisive, humorous and caustic writings and commentary on issues of race, faith, culture and politics have appeared on NPR and the Huffington Post, as well as on albums such as Dreams of Waking: Music for a Better World. Her socio-politicalized documentary shorts are beloved on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and her op-ed podcasts (such as The Brakedown) are laser-focused on all things Trump and 2025. How many jazz singers with clarion-clear vocal talents additionally hold jobs running news and culture desks, as she does, at KJLH Radio in Los Angeles?
Tucker is firmly on the frontline of news reportage. And with her new album Time Wouldn’t Wait (Green Hill Productions), produced by Greg Bryant (yes, “The Watchman,” formerly of WRTI), she is firmly on the frontlines of cinematic-inspired jazz whether through her series of bracing original compositions and the filmic songs she sings here such as “Pure Imagination” (from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “I Have Dreamed” (The King and I) and Billie Eilish’s female-empowered Barbie movie moment “What Was I Made For.”
Somehow, the jazz and news professional found time to discuss the currency of her music and culture reportage with JazzTimes, in an interview edited for length and clarity. I feel as if I know as much about you from your writing work, your socials and your videos that you filmed on Project 2025 and the present day of fascism as I do your brand of jazz. Discuss writing songs with that connective tissue to who you are as a commentator, because listening to the new album, I hear stories but nothing that is pounding me over the head with rhetoric. This whole question of whether or not there is or should be a connection between my social commentary and my music is one that I’ll probably ponder for the duration of my career. I think with my 2021 album, Dreams of Waking: Music for a Better World, there was a deliberate attempt to create some sort of social commentary element through my music. It made absolute sense for the time.
However, there did come a point where a lot of artists started feeling obligated to engage in social commentary with their music. It sort of became the thing to do. I never want to fall into cliché. I can’t say I have avoided it entirely, but I just want to stay true to who I am both in terms of the commentary that I do and in the music that I release. So my music has always been about my personal journey through this life. … I generally sit down to write so that I can explore how I’m making sense of the world, how I’m finding a sense of direction in life, how I’m processing through grief and how I’m working through my relationships with other people.
What’s the rundown of things that you read and digest, news-wise, before tackling the work day? Well, considering [my work], I cannot avoid the news even if I want to. I try to be responsible with the kind of news I take in, and I really try to keep a check on my own biases. Consequently, I work toward taking in news in a variety of formats. That doesn’t mean I take in extremist views just to give everybody a fair shot. I don’t believe in that. I will generally plug into and read a few mainstream sources along with a couple of independent publications and maybe a blog or two. I watch very little news on television.
I think of your integration of lyrical commentary and subtle satire as something in the vein of a Melvin Van Peebles and Mose Allison with a dash of Bob Dorough. Of course, Nina Simone come into this discussion too. As far as my musical influences for my political commentary, I can’t say that any of the names that you mentioned are particularly influential for me, aside from Nina. She really has become the most important jazz artist of her time for me. I didn’t always feel that way, but I took time to really examine her life. I’ve taught a couple of courses on her music and have actually done a couple of teaching/performance events through the Nashville Jazz Workshop and the Frist Museum called “Jazz on the Move,” that helped to further illuminate her influence for me.
Paul Harvey was a really important figure for me growing up. I listened to him on the radio every day. And I hate to be cliché but Oprah had a massive influence on me as well. There was no way she couldn’t. I’ll also share that I’m a huge fan of documentaries and storytelling in general. That has always been one of my favorite genres of film. Growing up, if it was PBS or NPR or an HBO documentary or something that was independently released, I was always a curious creature who wanted to know how things worked.
You just mentioned the Nashville Jazz Workshop. What is that organization, and that city, all about in relation to your perspective since I have also witnessed your work on Nashville’s country and scene, past and present, with Music City Select? Nashville represents a crucial part of my musical development. Our first album release show for Time Wouldn’t Wait was at the Nashville Jazz Workshop. I remember when I first got to the city, performing at the workshop was such an aspirational thing for me, and I’m glad to say I now consider the Workshop to be a bit of a home base for me.
With their focus on teaching and learning as well as performance, there’s really no place like that in the city of Nashville in terms of jazz and organic music. Being a so-called jazz singer in the city of Nashville was always a challenge. It’s one of the reasons I’m no longer based there.
Some opportunities did slowly but surely begin to open up in Nashville and allowed me to explore other lanes of musical expression. I had the chance to do a music seminar at the Country Music Hall of Fame. I got the chance to perform at the Bluebird and several other historic Nashville venues before I left. And one of the only cowrites I did in Nashville was with the Blues/Americana singer Keb’ Mo’. It turned out to be the title track of his 2019 album called Oklahoma. That album ended up winning a Grammy for Best Americana Album, so Nashville owes me nothing.
I know you work/have worked for Stevie Wonder’s radio station and that you have mentioned him as an influence. Can you go deeper on what he means to you as a whole? It would be hard to argue that there is a more influential musical figure in my life than Stevie Wonder. My parents, Doyle and Lynda Tucker, were musicians and my most significant teachers. And I think it would be hard to overstate the importance of Great American Songbook writers George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen. I’m a massive fan of Stephen Sondheim who I feel carried their work forward. James Taylor would be the quintessential singer/songwriter for me.
And my world was filled with nonstop contemporary (for the time) gospel like The Winans, Commissioned, The Clark Sisters, The Hawkins Family, Take 6, Andrae Crouch, James Cleveland and Mahalia Jackson. Stevie holds the DNA for all of that, though. There’s a spiritual element to his music that speaks beyond what the words and music can convey. He’s my musical alpha and omega.
When did you start work on Time Wouldn’t Wait, and how did its timing affect your tone, your message and the vibes of your instrumental accompanists (a Murderers’ Row of jazz session players such as organist/pianist Gary Versace, pianist Larry Goldings, trumpeter Rod McGaha, drummers Marcus Finnie and Christian Euman, bassist Vicente Archer and vibraphonist Simon Moullier)? Time Wouldn’t Wait is a unique project for me in that it is probably the only album that I have ever completed without writing new music. I have kind of an interesting problem in that I have such a stockpile of unreleased original songs that I will probably never put out enough albums to contain all of them. So I’m really doing this new thing where I am freeing myself up to allow some of those existing songs to be released rather than succumbing to my own expectations of coming up with at least a few new songs for every project.
I found that I had been writing a lot of songs with themes having to do with time. I think that’s probably an outflow of the fact that, like everyone else, I’m getting older, and I’m becoming more reflective about the precious nature of time and how I’m valuing it. Things have shifted quite a bit in the last few years.
Your album title has “wouldn’t” as past tense, as opposed to “won’t.” Why? Well, you’re quite perceptive there. The opening line of that song is, “You were never the best with time/You thought time would always wait for you.” That’s my father I’m speaking about. It seemed like he was always tripping over birthdays, holidays, special times. Like a toy in the middle of the floor that he didn’t see. Things were always catching him off-guard. He was like a wizard. I think we genuinely thought he would live a thousand years, because he had no sense of time.
And I saw him become almost resentful of the fact that time kept marching on, even as he begged it to slow down to allow him to do all the things he always meant to do. And that’s not a judgment. The man had seven children. He was a hard worker and spent very little time tiptoeing through the tulips, as it were. Watching both my parents just manage time the best they could was an early lesson to me that time is an entity that must be respected. Spending years engaged in activities that you’re indifferent about, or worse yet, are miserable doing, is not going to yield anything positive.
With my strict religious upbringing, I was always taught that our true reward lay beyond this life. I saw that kind of thinking cause a lot of folks in our circles to live pretty miserable lives. I just didn’t want to be one of those people. I don’t claim to know what comes after this, but I try to live as though there’s absolutely nothing. I find people who are not overly focused on an eternal reward tend to think more deeply about the choices they’re making in the here and now and tend to make fewer excuses to justify morality that is markedly immoral.
I can see you deconstructing the Billie Eilish Barbie song because of its sly feminist empowerment message. Can you discuss your other choice of covers such as “Pure Imagination” and the song from The King and I? There’s certainly something theatrical/filmic there. “Pure Imagination” is a song that I first included on one of my so-called “Lost Albums” — the ones that are no longer available. It’s been a favorite of mine to perform for many years, and I always thought it was a shame that the album we first included it on was no longer available. So that felt like a natural choice to include. I recently started performing “I Have Dreamed” — as big a fan as I am of Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals, I hadn’t really sat down and watched The King and I until a couple of years ago, though I knew a lot of the music. That song leapt out at me.
Not long after I watched the film, I was asked to do a tribute to Jewish songwriters through the Neranenah Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. That was one of the first songs I put on my list. It’s slowly becoming one of my all-time favorite theater songs to do. Both of those songs really have a magical quality to them. I guess because of what my voice naturally evokes and maybe out of a desire to provide a counter-balance to a lot of the ugliness I have to confront with the commentary I do, I like to bring a bit of that magic to my audiences.
Can you talk about the challenges of writing “Tall Georgia Pines”? There are details there, “These tall Georgia pines have been holding all my secrets / it’s been a long, lonely time since I’ve been down this way,” that make up a story without telling me the full story. My husband and I had been staying in the home of our friend and the great Hammond organist, Dr. Lonnie Smith, in southern Florida a few years before he passed. The day we were supposed to fly back to Nashville, I woke up with a strange feeling. I didn’t feel we were supposed to fly out. After some negotiation, we agreed to cancel our flight and rent a car to drive back to Nashville.
As we were driving through central Georgia, and admiring its beauty, I felt that chorus almost singing to me from the trees themselves. That full chorus came to me within a few minutes. I sat on the chorus for a few years and finally decided I needed to do something with it during the pandemic.
My sister, Diamond Tucker, was visiting us for the holidays in late 2020, and I asked her to try her hand at writing a melody for the verses. I loved what she came up with, so I had her write lyrics to the second verse, and I wrote lyrics to the first one. Then I wrote the music for the bridge.
I feel that that song is telling someone’s story, someone in that region who sent out a spiritual clarion call to me. So that song isn’t my story. It belongs to someone else, someone who’s grappling with a history of abuse and shame. And thankfully, my sister felt that story deeply and knew just what that song needed. To this day, I’m not really sure why I felt so strongly that we didn’t need to take that flight, but if it was all about writing that song, I’m glad I was listening. JT
Vocalist, Songwriter and Social Commentator Dara Starr Tucker Has News Fit to Print (and Sing)
From Max Roach and Oscar Brown’s We Insist! to Nina Simone’s Emergency Ward, with recordings from albums from Nellie McKay, Melvin Van Peebles, Bob Dorough and Amanda Ekery sandwiched in and around them, jazz has been a force for wry social commentary as much as rock, soul and folk.
Then there’s singer-pianist-composer Dara Starr Tucker, whose incisive, humorous and caustic writings and commentary on issues of race, faith, culture and politics have appeared on NPR and the Huffington Post, as well as on albums such as Dreams of Waking: Music for a Better World. Her socio-politicalized documentary shorts are beloved on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and her op-ed podcasts (such as The Brakedown) are laser-focused on all things Trump and 2025. How many jazz singers with clarion-clear vocal talents additionally hold jobs running news and culture desks, as she does, at KJLH Radio in Los Angeles?
Somehow, the jazz and news professional found time to discuss the currency of her music and culture reportage with JazzTimes, in an interview edited for length and clarity.
I feel as if I know as much about you from your writing work, your socials and your videos that you filmed on Project 2025 and the present day of fascism as I do your brand of jazz. Discuss writing songs with that connective tissue to who you are as a commentator, because listening to the new album, I hear stories but nothing that is pounding me over the head with rhetoric.
This whole question of whether or not there is or should be a connection between my social commentary and my music is one that I’ll probably ponder for the duration of my career. I think with my 2021 album, Dreams of Waking: Music for a Better World, there was a deliberate attempt to create some sort of social commentary element through my music. It made absolute sense for the time.
However, there did come a point where a lot of artists started feeling obligated to engage in social commentary with their music. It sort of became the thing to do. I never want to fall into cliché. I can’t say I have avoided it entirely, but I just want to stay true to who I am both in terms of the commentary that I do and in the music that I release. So my music has always been about my personal journey through this life. … I generally sit down to write so that I can explore how I’m making sense of the world, how I’m finding a sense of direction in life, how I’m processing through grief and how I’m working through my relationships with other people.
What’s the rundown of things that you read and digest, news-wise, before tackling the work day?
Well, considering [my work], I cannot avoid the news even if I want to. I try to be responsible with the kind of news I take in, and I really try to keep a check on my own biases. Consequently, I work toward taking in news in a variety of formats. That doesn’t mean I take in extremist views just to give everybody a fair shot. I don’t believe in that. I will generally plug into and read a few mainstream sources along with a couple of independent publications and maybe a blog or two. I watch very little news on television.
As far as my musical influences for my political commentary, I can’t say that any of the names that you mentioned are particularly influential for me, aside from Nina. She really has become the most important jazz artist of her time for me. I didn’t always feel that way, but I took time to really examine her life. I’ve taught a couple of courses on her music and have actually done a couple of teaching/performance events through the Nashville Jazz Workshop and the Frist Museum called “Jazz on the Move,” that helped to further illuminate her influence for me.
Paul Harvey was a really important figure for me growing up. I listened to him on the radio every day. And I hate to be cliché but Oprah had a massive influence on me as well. There was no way she couldn’t. I’ll also share that I’m a huge fan of documentaries and storytelling in general. That has always been one of my favorite genres of film. Growing up, if it was PBS or NPR or an HBO documentary or something that was independently released, I was always a curious creature who wanted to know how things worked.
You just mentioned the Nashville Jazz Workshop. What is that organization, and that city, all about in relation to your perspective since I have also witnessed your work on Nashville’s country and scene, past and present, with Music City Select?
Nashville represents a crucial part of my musical development. Our first album release show for Time Wouldn’t Wait was at the Nashville Jazz Workshop. I remember when I first got to the city, performing at the workshop was such an aspirational thing for me, and I’m glad to say I now consider the Workshop to be a bit of a home base for me.
With their focus on teaching and learning as well as performance, there’s really no place like that in the city of Nashville in terms of jazz and organic music. Being a so-called jazz singer in the city of Nashville was always a challenge. It’s one of the reasons I’m no longer based there.
Some opportunities did slowly but surely begin to open up in Nashville and allowed me to explore other lanes of musical expression. I had the chance to do a music seminar at the Country Music Hall of Fame. I got the chance to perform at the Bluebird and several other historic Nashville venues before I left. And one of the only cowrites I did in Nashville was with the Blues/Americana singer Keb’ Mo’. It turned out to be the title track of his 2019 album called Oklahoma. That album ended up winning a Grammy for Best Americana Album, so Nashville owes me nothing.
It would be hard to argue that there is a more influential musical figure in my life than Stevie Wonder. My parents, Doyle and Lynda Tucker, were musicians and my most significant teachers. And I think it would be hard to overstate the importance of Great American Songbook writers George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen. I’m a massive fan of Stephen Sondheim who I feel carried their work forward. James Taylor would be the quintessential singer/songwriter for me.
And my world was filled with nonstop contemporary (for the time) gospel like The Winans, Commissioned, The Clark Sisters, The Hawkins Family, Take 6, Andrae Crouch, James Cleveland and Mahalia Jackson. Stevie holds the DNA for all of that, though. There’s a spiritual element to his music that speaks beyond what the words and music can convey. He’s my musical alpha and omega.
When did you start work on Time Wouldn’t Wait, and how did its timing affect your tone, your message and the vibes of your instrumental accompanists (a Murderers’ Row of jazz session players such as organist/pianist Gary Versace, pianist Larry Goldings, trumpeter Rod McGaha, drummers Marcus Finnie and Christian Euman, bassist Vicente Archer and vibraphonist Simon Moullier)?
Time Wouldn’t Wait is a unique project for me in that it is probably the only album that I have ever completed without writing new music. I have kind of an interesting problem in that I have such a stockpile of unreleased original songs that I will probably never put out enough albums to contain all of them. So I’m really doing this new thing where I am freeing myself up to allow some of those existing songs to be released rather than succumbing to my own expectations of coming up with at least a few new songs for every project.
I found that I had been writing a lot of songs with themes having to do with time. I think that’s probably an outflow of the fact that, like everyone else, I’m getting older, and I’m becoming more reflective about the precious nature of time and how I’m valuing it. Things have shifted quite a bit in the last few years.
Your album title has “wouldn’t” as past tense, as opposed to “won’t.” Why?
Well, you’re quite perceptive there. The opening line of that song is, “You were never the best with time/You thought time would always wait for you.” That’s my father I’m speaking about. It seemed like he was always tripping over birthdays, holidays, special times. Like a toy in the middle of the floor that he didn’t see. Things were always catching him off-guard. He was like a wizard. I think we genuinely thought he would live a thousand years, because he had no sense of time.
And I saw him become almost resentful of the fact that time kept marching on, even as he begged it to slow down to allow him to do all the things he always meant to do. And that’s not a judgment. The man had seven children. He was a hard worker and spent very little time tiptoeing through the tulips, as it were. Watching both my parents just manage time the best they could was an early lesson to me that time is an entity that must be respected. Spending years engaged in activities that you’re indifferent about, or worse yet, are miserable doing, is not going to yield anything positive.
With my strict religious upbringing, I was always taught that our true reward lay beyond this life. I saw that kind of thinking cause a lot of folks in our circles to live pretty miserable lives. I just didn’t want to be one of those people. I don’t claim to know what comes after this, but I try to live as though there’s absolutely nothing. I find people who are not overly focused on an eternal reward tend to think more deeply about the choices they’re making in the here and now and tend to make fewer excuses to justify morality that is markedly immoral.
“Pure Imagination” is a song that I first included on one of my so-called “Lost Albums” — the ones that are no longer available. It’s been a favorite of mine to perform for many years, and I always thought it was a shame that the album we first included it on was no longer available. So that felt like a natural choice to include. I recently started performing “I Have Dreamed” — as big a fan as I am of Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals, I hadn’t really sat down and watched The King and I until a couple of years ago, though I knew a lot of the music. That song leapt out at me.
Not long after I watched the film, I was asked to do a tribute to Jewish songwriters through the Neranenah Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. That was one of the first songs I put on my list. It’s slowly becoming one of my all-time favorite theater songs to do. Both of those songs really have a magical quality to them. I guess because of what my voice naturally evokes and maybe out of a desire to provide a counter-balance to a lot of the ugliness I have to confront with the commentary I do, I like to bring a bit of that magic to my audiences.
Can you talk about the challenges of writing “Tall Georgia Pines”? There are details there, “These tall Georgia pines have been holding all my secrets / it’s been a long, lonely time since I’ve been down this way,” that make up a story without telling me the full story.
My husband and I had been staying in the home of our friend and the great Hammond organist, Dr. Lonnie Smith, in southern Florida a few years before he passed. The day we were supposed to fly back to Nashville, I woke up with a strange feeling. I didn’t feel we were supposed to fly out. After some negotiation, we agreed to cancel our flight and rent a car to drive back to Nashville.
As we were driving through central Georgia, and admiring its beauty, I felt that chorus almost singing to me from the trees themselves. That full chorus came to me within a few minutes. I sat on the chorus for a few years and finally decided I needed to do something with it during the pandemic.
My sister, Diamond Tucker, was visiting us for the holidays in late 2020, and I asked her to try her hand at writing a melody for the verses. I loved what she came up with, so I had her write lyrics to the second verse, and I wrote lyrics to the first one. Then I wrote the music for the bridge.
I feel that that song is telling someone’s story, someone in that region who sent out a spiritual clarion call to me. So that song isn’t my story. It belongs to someone else, someone who’s grappling with a history of abuse and shame. And thankfully, my sister felt that story deeply and knew just what that song needed. To this day, I’m not really sure why I felt so strongly that we didn’t need to take that flight, but if it was all about writing that song, I’m glad I was listening. JT