For years, Somi has been on the road, tracing places, histories and inherited stories. On her new album, What Does It Take to Bloom?, the map turns inwards.
There is a particular creative freedom that comes with realising you do not have to choose one version of yourself. For Somi, it has taken the shape of a new album. What Does It Take to Bloom?, released through her independent label Salon Africana, is a 13-track project about belonging, loss, womanhood, uncertainty and the long, unfinished journey of becoming whole. But beneath these themes is a more personal creative shift: after years of using music to trace places and histories, she is now locating herself with her art.
For Somi, every album is an act of place-making. Her previous work has mapped Nigeria, Harlem and the cultural and political inheritance of Miriam Makeba. This time, she is mapping herself. It is an idea that becomes especially interesting when considering the trajectory of Somi’s career. She is a vocalist and composer but also an actor, playwright, scholar and cultural organiser.
Her work has travelled between jazz, soul, African musical traditions, theatre and performance. She wrote and starred in Dreaming Zenzile, her tribute to Makeba, and later made her Broadway debut in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. She has also created Salon Africana as a cultural agency and record label. The common thread is not a genre. It is storytelling.
A Career That Was Never Meant to Fit Neatly
Somi has spent her career existing in the space between the categories that define her. She is part of the international jazz world, but she has never limited herself to being a Jazz singer. Her music incorporates African musical traditions, soul, highlife, spoken word and the experience of navigating between different cultural worlds.
On What Does It Take to Bloom? those influences are all still present, but she is less afraid of letting them exist beside each other without needing to be reconciled into a neat identity.
In a recent interview with OkayAfrica, Somi described the sound she was searching for as something expansive enough to contain all of her influences and selves. She eventually realised that the album was, in her words, “a mapping of myself.”
That distinction matters.
There is often an expectation that artists should become easier to explain as their careers develop. A genre, a visual identity, a recognisable sound, a neat origin story. The more successful the artist becomes, the more tempting it can be to turn that complexity into a brand people can understand at a glance.
Somi has moved in the opposite direction.“I’m a song maker first and foremost,” she told OkayAfrica. “I’m an African woman, and I’m a song maker and a storyteller.”That is a different way of thinking about an artistic identity. The work does not have to sit inside one category because the person making it does not.
From Mapping Places to Mapping the Self
Place has always been a significant aspect of Somi’s work.
Her previous works have been about Lagos, African immigrants in Harlem and Miriam Makeba’s legacy.
The Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba album was actually created as a musical piece, Dreaming Zenzile , which Somi wrote and starred in as a tribute to the South African singer and activist.
What Does It Take to Bloom? ‘s creation process was also geographical. The album was written and recorded in Dakar, Lagos, Paris, and New York City. However, the journey between the cities allowed for a more introspective look at the places she had been.
How does one reconcile with the places that one has lived? What does one do with the people that one has lost and the legacies one has inherited? She describes the work as an inquest into where and how to take root after a life spent wandering and loss.
Somi hoped that her songs would help people feel at home, or, if that is impossible, that they might experience her “coming Home to myself.”The notion of home here is not a specific place but rather a process of becoming.
Blooming Without Becoming Someone Else
The title What Does It Take to Bloom? could easily suggest transformation in the conventional sense: becoming bigger, better, more successful, more visible.
Somi’s understanding of blooming is quieter.
In an interview with Sowetan, she described it as beginning with self-awareness, groundedness and knowing yourself. Blooming, she explained, is not necessarily a dramatic outward transformation. It is about growing within yourself and becoming more whole.
That philosophy gives the album its deeper creative significance.
The question is not simply what Somi is becoming. It is what she has to make room for in order to become more fully herself.
That includes the different musical worlds she has inhabited, the different disciplines she has worked across, her experiences of womanhood, her relationship to African cultural memory and the realities of living between places.
It also includes contradiction.
There is jazz alongside highlife. Personal grief alongside love songs. African heritage alongside American cultural experience. Theatre alongside music. Scholarship alongside performance.
The album does not seem interested in sanding those edges down.
Instead, the tension becomes part of the language.
Making Room for Every Version of the Artist
That may be the most useful way to understand Somi’s idea of blooming: as an expansion rather than a reinvention.
She is not abandoning the artist she was before What Does It Take to Bloom?. She is allowing more of herself to exist inside the work.
The album’s three previously released singles each open a different door into that process. “We’re All Falling” confronts mortality and the fragility of life. “Sometimes Love”, featuring Nigerian duo The Cavemen, carries the energy of Lagos, where it was recorded. “So You Want to Be a Woman”, featuring saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, turns toward the expectations and burdens attached to womanhood.
Together, they make the album’s idea of selfhood feel less like a single statement and more like a collection of lived experiences.
That is fitting for an artist whose work has always crossed borders.
And perhaps this is where Somi’s creative map becomes most interesting. The places she has moved through have not disappeared. Nigeria, Harlem, East Africa, the American Midwest, the jazz world, theatre and academia are still there. They have simply become coordinates on a larger map.
One that now points back to her.
There Is No Final Version of the Self
What Does It Take to Bloom? is ultimately interested in an uncomfortable truth about creative growth: there may never be a final version of yourself to arrive at.
Somi describes wholeness as something nonlinear and unfinished. That makes the album less of a declaration of arrival and more of a record of movement.
It is the sound of an artist asking where she belongs while recognising that belonging might not require choosing one place, one genre or one identity.
That feels especially relevant to multidisciplinary creatives, whose careers increasingly refuse the old boundaries between musician, writer, performer, designer, scholar, filmmaker or cultural worker.
The pressure to pick a lane can be useful for marketing, but it can be restrictive for making.
Somi’s answer is to stand in the middle.
Her new creative map does not erase the places she has been. It gathers them. The music, theatre, scholarship, migration, memory, loss and inherited histories all become part of the same landscape.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, Somi is making a home for herself.
