Turn On the YouTube and Tune In to Martina DaSilva
An early stalwart of the new Hot Jazz movement, she is one of the more significant millennial artists who treat YouTube as a legitimate performance medium — much as radio was used 80 to 90 years ago.
Ten years ago, a friend sent me a YouTube link to a short performance that was both modest and highly impressive. Shot with a camera phone, it’s a fuzzy and incomplete video of three young musicians at a kitchen table, two of whom I was already familiar with.
Mike Davis, a gifted trumpeter who has since become known as a master of pre-modern brass styles, is on the left, while Jerron Paxton, easily my favorite younger blues player, is on the right. In the center sits Martina DaSilva, a singer new to me at the time. Singing mostly in harmony, they deliver about 90 seconds of the 1926 jazz standard “’Deed I Do.” No one is trying to pull focus, all three are sitting down, and yet Ms. DaSilva is the one who captivates your eyes and ears.
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