Interview with Valerie Troutt, Oakland, California

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Date
2020-08-31
Main contributor
Valerie Troutt
Summary
Valerie Troutt (Oakland, California)

Composer Valerie Troutt sings soulful, conscious originals inspired by her relationships with family, community, and hope for a brighter tomorrow. Bay Area-born and bred, jazz and gospel trained, and internationally respected, Valerie Troutt is a musical collagist, borrowing from ancestral centuries of sound, channeling spirits, and delivering the stories of our love, loss, and lives. There’s a light in this unapologetically unconventional artist/teacher/activist for whom art and activism are intertwined. Within this spiritual and social justice-driven performer is a lifelong hunger for craft, connection, and cultural narratives and an indefatigable thirst to serve as an agape griot to a waiting and hurting people. The Sound of Peace, her long-awaited, full-length debut comes after a critically acclaimed EP and several wizening years culminating in Valerie Troutt’s acceptance of her own original artistic difference in a world of commercial carbon copies. 

Interviewed by Raquel Paraíso, 08/31/2020.
Contributor
Raquel Paraíso
Subjects
Music; United States; Covid-19 Pandemic
Location
Oakland, California
Collection
Musicians in America during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Unit
Society for Ethnomusicology

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