säje on the emotional space that feminine energy allows

Vocal group säje tells me about their journey - from a weekend retreat in Palm Springs to the release of their first full length album and its subsequent Grammy win.

I’ve been saving this episode for a couple of months. I was waiting for the Grammys on Sunday night before I shared this with you. I was waiting for säje - the vocal group made up of singers Sara Gazarek, Amanda Taylor, Johnaye Kendrick, and Erin Bentlage - to win their Grammy for their arrangement of “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning”. 

They recorded it with one of the most admired musical minds today, Jacob Collier.  And like much of what has happened with säje so far, that recording was both unintended and totally right, somewhere between the reward for the hard work of talented artists, and magic. 

Of course I didn’t know if they would win.  But on the other hand, I pretty much did know. 

The story plays like a dream. 

One day Jacob Collier stopped by the LA recording studio (Lucy’s Meat Market), where säje was working on their debut album. He was friendly with some of them and so he casually dropped in. One thing led to another and he ended up playing a few free form takes of “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning” - there’s footage of it online and you can see him improvising his arrangement. You can also see his childlike enthusiasm, his playful energy, his request to do just one more take, because he was having so much fun. 

After Jacob left, the singers in säje built their vocal arrangement around what he had played. It’s a beautiful marriage of improvisation and arrangement, and the result ends up sounding completely inevitable. They contextualized Collier’s spontaneous approach, brought it fully into their world, built a frame for his impressionistic gestures, and then filled in the landscape. 

This was not their first experience with serendipity. 

Before säje was säje, back when it was just an idea floated by Sara Gazarek in 2018 to put some kind of vocal group together, the four women gathered at a rental house in Palm Springs, California to get to know one another and discuss the possibility of doing something together. 

They came out of that weekend with a song “Desert Song”, a sound, and the makings of a story. 

The members of säje don’t live in the same place (Sara and Erin live in Los Angeles, Johnaye and Amanda live in Seattle), but they started to work as a group, and eventually recorded “Desert Song”. Without a full record, without a label, without much of a team in place, they submitted the song to the Grammy’s  - their first song - and it was nominated in 2020. 

Of course it was nominated. It’s so beautifully haunting, so sophisticated, so evocative, rooted and cascading, hip and emotive. Their sound seemed to emerge out of the desert, it seemed to blow across the arid Coachella valley, it was just there for them and it pointed to so much possibility. 

And it raises some interesting questions, like how is it possible that four people who were more or less randomly assembled came out with such a unified sound so quickly? Was this luck? Intuition? Just good production in the multiple senses of the word? Was there something inherently balanced, aligned, destined about these four people and their chemistry? 

They would have to wait to find out. Because COVID came and did what COVID did.

 

Eventually säje released their debut album in 2023. It featured guest appearances by Ambrose Akinmusire, Michael Mayo, Terri Lynn Carrington, and of course Jacob Collier, among others. But at the core of the album was the signature silk säje sound which is a little hard to define, but very easy to identify. It’s technically challenging to execute - suspended chords and interweaving lines - and very satisfying to experience.  They ascend beyond their training, and into artistry. 

I started hearing the name säje on the tongues of my friends and colleagues but I did not listen! Until one day their music found me, blowing in under my Brooklyn door, and it was just there for me, as natural as water or wind. 

I went deep. Fortunately they are thoroughly modern in their approach to content making, and there are plenty of videos and clips online to satisfy the säje curious. 

Often in their videos they dress in monochrome outfits, each in a different earth tone, or sometimes in the same color (a deep green, beige). It’s an interesting sleight of hand, polyphonous voices in monochromatic clothes. It actually seems to support their all for one, one for all philosophy - they are four unique voices, coming from four unique places, but they are all equally important, even necessary, to make the project work. And they are unified. 

 

We met at a photo studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn late last year when they were in New York for a show. They had spent the afternoon making holiday videos. I arrived monochromatic in gray hoping to become an honorary member for the evening.

We had a beautiful talk about their formation, their journey - from that first weekend retreat in Palm Springs to the release of their first full length album and its subsequent Grammy nomination for Best Arrangement Instruments and Vocals with Jacob Collier for “In The Wee Small Hour Of The Morning”, collective lyric writing, managing logistics and juggling four schedules, the emotional space that feminine energy allows, and discovering who they are in public.