The Women’s Vocal Jazz Supergroup That’s Redefining The Rules
From left to right: Amanda Taylor, Sara Gazarek, Johnaye Kendrick, and Erin Bentlage come together as säje. LAUREN DESBERG
It is not common for a nascent ensemble’s first collaborative composition to be nominated for a GRAMMY. Säje is not a common ensemble.
Rhyming with the word “beige,” säje is an artistic acronym for the first names of Sara Gazarek, Amanda Taylor, Johnaye Kendrick, and Erin Bentlage, four vocalist/composers who came together in the desert without really knowing what they were getting into and ended up finding a well of inspiration in one another deeper than any of them could have imagined.
Members of the group had collaborated with one another individually—but until they seized a chance opportunity to meet in the California desert, had never all met. “We had this one retreat, and were like, ‘Ok, let’s try this out, hopefully we get along,’” Bentlage recalled, “and then it exploded.”
So what happened? “Nothing happened except for drinking and cooking and laughing and talking and swimming and writing ‘Desert Song,’” Gazarek shared, referring to their first, GRAMMY-nominated, composition. “And this cumulative falling—in love—down this tunnel of, ‘Wow I had no idea, what else is here, how deep does this go?’ There hasn’t been a bottom to the well; it just gets deeper and deeper.”
Gazarek, Taylor, Kendrick, and Bentlage are each widely-hailed composers and performers in their own rights. But being together brought out something new from all of them. “That first original composition,” Gazarek explained about “Desert Song,” “came from recognizing the peace that we felt as four female jazz musician composer-educators who had never before collaborated in a 100% female collaborative experience.” Or as Bentlage described it, it was the collective “oh my God this is what it feels like to be creating with feminine energy in a beautifully accepted form.”
Kendrick elaborated: “We’re taught, as you’re coming up [as an artist], ‘It’s a male-dominated field, you have to be one of the boys, and know how to hang, and what to say, and all of that,’....I didn’t think to immerse myself and surround myself with women.” But, she realized, “It’s amazing to be surrounded by powerful women with endless ideas and the desire to uplift; it has changed our lives.”
One of the things that makes säje so special, according to its members, is how much of the creative process they themselves control, from the mixing to the composing and arranging, to the recording, video editing, and even cover art. “If I were by myself, I wouldn’t necessarily do all the things that I do for säje,” Gazarek noted. But she has been inspired to do more by watching her bandmates reach their fullest potential: “It’s something I’ve never experienced before, and säje continues to teach me.”
It’s clearly working out well for the group. Their latest original composition, “Wisteria,” recently won the grand prize of the John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the folk category, and is currently up for public voting for the Lennon Award.
Like “Desert Song,” “Wisteria” is also about “feeling so safe that you start to trust and love yourself in a way that you haven’t before, because you feel so wholly loved by the circle you’re in; empowered to grow into your full self because you’re surrounded by this love,” according to Taylor. “Whenever we are talking about what we do next, we are always trying to think about how can we find opportunities for young women to get this experience.”
To grow this loving circle, säje endeavors to open up spaces for other female artists to be highlighted as well, whether onstage or behind the scenes. The only all-female nominee in their GRAMMY category, säje aims to be part of a paradigm shift in the jazz community: “not just that female composers see themselves in this community, but that everyone see them,” Gazarek envisioned.
“I feel very empowered in the context of this group to question: what are the rules, and why do I have to follow them, and if they feel wrong, why do they feel wrong?” Bentlage affirmed. “My experience coming up as a musician was so surrounded by masculine energy, that a lot of times when we’re in a jazz or jazz-adjacent space, it feels difficult to get away from that masculine energy. [If those are] the only examples you have, when you set out to learn something, you’ll unlikely accept things that are in a different direction.”
Part of that shift includes not just the identities of the musicians present but also their approach to music-making. Gazarek admitted that the group had originally made a structured agenda for their desert retreat—but quickly scrapped it when they realized they had an opportunity to “just find each other” instead, and let that depth of vulnerability and connection inspire them to co-create.
“One thing that säje brings is the vocabulary that we’re using, and the complexity that we’re leaning into,” Bentlage explained, “but from the lens of the feminine energy, and that softness and gentleness. We can bring it if we need to, but don’t feel we need to just to prove ourselves. Sometimes people would come to us, and say, ‘I didn’t know you could allow yourself to feel that way onstage, in this sort of a space, in a jazz space.’”
Säje is blazing a new trail for female composers and performers in the jazz world. Rather than being intimidated by the challenge, Gazarek sees the opportunity to write a new narrative from scratch; as she says, “There isn’t anything to hold us back from all the doors being open.” The group is working on a new arrangement these days: a mashup of “Solid Ground” and “Blackbird”—in Gazarek’s words, “A reflection of people who see what is available to me and this is it; but people who have broken past that and are saying to others, ‘Fly; it’s ok to fly.’”
Despite not yet being signed to a record label, Säje is flying high. Kendrick captured the experience most powerfully: “When you see videos of people who are colorblind and they put on those glasses for the first time—and are like ‘WHAAT!?!?’ That’s what a säje rehearsal feels like to me.”