When the artist and writer Juliana Huxtable first discovered the American jazz singer Linda Sharrock, she was “firmly in the ‘psychedelic era’” of her life. “I am convinced Linda’s renderings found me,” she writes in Praise Poem for Linda, an essay that doesn’t just pay tribute to one woman’s croons, but also draws us into the “masterful eruption of unmistakably Black expression”. Sharrock is, for Huxtable, a virtuoso in a long line of Black female vocalists who, despite being forerunners of the avant-garde, have largely gone uncredited.
“An essay is never about a singular subject, it’s always about a lot of things,” says writer, editor and broadcaster Sinéad Gleeson during a Zoom call from her home in Dublin. Take Huxtable’s praise poem, for instance. “I love that essay,” Gleeson says.…
