July 06, 2026

Somi’s new era asks us what it really takes to bloom

Somi Kakoma

Somi Kakoma has built one of the most quietly formidable careers in contemporary music by refusing to choose between elegance and inquiry. She is a jazz vocalist, but never only that. She is a songwriter whose phrasing can float like chamber music, then turn conversational and political without warning. She is a playwright who treats the stage as a place where African women artists are not footnotes, muses or historical accessories, but the center of the weather. This week, Somi stands out because her new album turns inward at a moment when many artists are still trying to project outward. After years of work shaped by migration, memory, diaspora and tribute, she is asking a more intimate question: what does it take to bloom when the place you have been seeking is finally yourself? That question lands with particular force because Somi’s career has never been casual about place. Harlem, Lagos, Kigali, Kampala, Johannesburg and New York are not decorative coordinates in her work; they are emotional geographies. Her acclaimed albums have explored African immigrant life in Harlem, the creative urgency of Lagos, and the towering legacy of Miriam Makeba. Along the way, she became a historic Grammy nominee and one of the clearest contemporary voices in what she has often described as New African Jazz. What makes the new chapter compelling is not simply that Somi has released another album. It is that she has arrived at a phase of authorship where the large cultural maps she has drawn for years seem to fold back toward the body, the spirit and the private room. That kind of turn can be risky for an artist known for intellectually rich concepts. Somi’s gift has been making ideas sing without draining them of feeling. Her latest era suggests that the archive she is now mining is internal: healing, home, softness, endurance and growth after weather.

Early Life

Somi was born Laura Kabasomi Kakoma in Champaign, Illinois, to parents from Rwanda and Uganda, a background that would become more than a biographical detail in her art. Her stage name comes from Kabasomi, a name that has traveled with her through recordings, theater work and international stages. She grew up in a household shaped by East African memory and Midwestern American life, an experience that helped form her lifelong interest in belonging, language, displacement and cultural inheritance. Before Somi became known for her supple, literary vocal style, she studied cello and developed the kind of musical discipline that can still be heard in the architecture of her songs. Her academic path was just as central. She studied anthropology and African studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, then went on to graduate study in performance studies at New York University. That combination matters. Somi’s music has never sounded as if it came only from the practice room. It also carries the field notes of an observer: someone listening for how people speak, migrate, mourn, celebrate and remake themselves in new cities. Her early years placed her between worlds, but instead of treating that in-between state as confusion, she eventually turned it into a method. In Somi’s work, identity is not a slogan. It is a set of rhythms, foodways, accents, family histories, political ruptures and private longings. The songs often begin there.

Family

Parents: [‘Her father is Rwandan.’, ‘Her mother is Ugandan.’]

Career

Somi’s career began outside the usual machinery of jazz stardom. She did not arrive as a retro stylist or a club singer packaged around standards. From her earliest recordings, she seemed interested in building a sound that could hold African diasporic storytelling, jazz improvisation, soul, poetry and contemporary urban life without flattening any of them. Her early independent work, including Eternal Motive, introduced an artist with a serious sense of authorship. But the larger turning point came when Somi began to refine the musical language that would later be called New African Jazz, a phrase that suits her because it signals both lineage and invention. By the time she released Red Soil in My Eyes in 2007, Somi was emerging as a vocalist who could move with unusual ease between continents and traditions. The title alone suggested how strongly land, memory and inheritance mattered to her. In 2009, If the Rains Come First widened her audience and placed her in conversation with major figures, including Hugh Masekela and Angelique Kidjo. The album showed that Somi could be intimate without being small, and global without sounding generic. Her voice had a distinctive quality: not a power instrument in the showy sense, but a precise, luminous presence that could bend a phrase until it revealed a second meaning. The next major chapter came from Lagos. Somi spent an extended period in Nigeria, absorbing the city’s density, ambition, contradictions and artistic charge. The result was The Lagos Music Salon, released in 2014, a conceptually rich album that treated Lagos not as an exotic backdrop but as a living, argumentative collaborator. The project featured guests including Angelique Kidjo and Common and helped establish Somi as an artist capable of transforming travel into dramaturgy. She was not collecting sounds; she was staging encounters. Her next studio album, Petite Afrique, released in 2017, may be the clearest example of how her observational gifts became musical form. The title refers to the African immigrant enclave in Harlem, and the album explored the lives, invisibility, humor, ache and resilience of African immigrants in New York. In lesser hands, that subject might have become sociological summary. Somi made it theatrical and human. The songs moved through gentrification, longing, romance, bureaucracy, exile and self-definition. Petite Afrique won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album, a victory that mattered because it recognized a jazz project whose imagination was unapologetically African, diasporic and contemporary. Somi’s next historic moment came with Holy Room: Live at Alte Oper with Frankfurt Radio Big Band. The album, recorded with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, earned a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album. It also made Somi the first African woman nominated in a Grammy jazz vocal category, a milestone that placed her in a broader conversation about who gets recognized within jazz institutions and whose innovations are allowed to sit at the center of the genre. Rather than simply repeat the formula, Somi then turned toward one of her most ambitious projects: Miriam Makeba. Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba, released in 2022, was not a standard tribute album. It was an act of artistic kinship. Makeba, whose given name was Zenzile, was a singer, activist, exile and global symbol whose life cannot be separated from the cultural politics of apartheid South Africa and pan-African solidarity. Somi approached Makeba with reverence but not imitation. The album featured collaborators such as Gregory Porter, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Seun Kuti and Thandiswa Mazwai, and earned Somi another Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album. At the same time, Somi expanded the Makeba project into theater with Dreaming Zenzile, a musical she wrote and performed. The stage work imagined Makeba near the end of her life and brought Somi’s gifts as vocalist, scholar, dramatist and cultural interpreter into one room. That is a difficult balance: to honor an icon without disappearing behind her. Somi managed it by making tribute an active conversation rather than a museum display. This is why her current inward turn feels earned. She has spent years singing cities, histories and ancestors into focus. The new album’s emphasis on healing, blooming and finding home in oneself is not a retreat from the world; it is a continuation of her central theme by more private means. For Somi, home has always been complicated. It can be an ancestral country, a neighborhood, a language, a stage, a memory, a wound or a sound. Now, the question seems to be what happens when the search for home becomes less geographical and more spiritual. Few artists could make that pivot without losing scale. Somi can because her music has always understood that the personal and political are not separate rooms.

Television

• The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (2017) — Herself, musical guest

Awards & Honors

• 2018 — NAACP Image Awards (Outstanding Jazz Album) — Won
• 2021 — Grammy Awards (Best Jazz Vocal Album) — Nominated
• 2023 — Grammy Awards (Best Jazz Vocal Album) — Nominated

Business Ventures

• Founded Salon Africana, an artist-centered cultural platform and label associated with her recordings, performance work and broader commitment to African diasporic arts.
• Founded New Africa Live, a nonprofit arts organization created to support and present contemporary African artists and African diasporic creative work.

Philanthropy

• Through New Africa Live, Somi has supported platforms for contemporary African artists, using performance and cultural programming to expand visibility for African and diasporic voices.
• Her work as a cultural advocate has consistently centered immigrant stories, African artistic lineages and the preservation of Black global music histories.

Current Projects

• A new album marking an introspective creative era focused on healing, blooming and finding home within the self.
• Ongoing live performances that connect her recorded work with jazz, theater and global music audiences.
• Continued development of multidisciplinary work that bridges music, performance, African diasporic history and theatrical storytelling.

Interesting Facts

• Somi’s full name is Laura Kabasomi Kakoma, and her stage name comes from Kabasomi.
• She was born in Champaign, Illinois, but her family roots are in Rwanda and Uganda.
• Before she became known primarily as a vocalist, she studied cello.
• Her academic background includes anthropology and African studies, which helps explain the cultural specificity and research-driven quality of her albums.
• She also studied performance studies at New York University, an education that connects directly to her later work as a playwright and stage performer.
• Somi spent a significant creative period in Lagos, Nigeria, before making The Lagos Music Salon.
• Petite Afrique takes its title from a name associated with Harlem’s African immigrant community.
• She has collaborated with major artists across generations, including Hugh Masekela, Angelique Kidjo, Common, Gregory Porter, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Seun Kuti and Thandiswa Mazwai.
• Her Grammy-nominated Holy Room was recorded live with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Germany.
• Her Grammy recognition was historic because she became the first African woman nominated in a Grammy jazz vocal category.
• Zenzile is Miriam Makeba’s given name, and Somi used it as the title for her Makeba reimagination project.
• Dreaming Zenzile imagines Miriam Makeba near the end of her life rather than presenting a conventional cradle-to-grave biography.
• Somi’s music often treats cities as characters, especially Lagos, Harlem and New York.
• Her work resists the idea that jazz must be separated from African contemporary experience; instead, she places African diasporic life inside the genre’s present tense.

Why ShowBiz Selected This Entertainer

Somi is featured this week because her new album signals a striking new chapter in a career already defined by depth, range and historic recognition. The album’s inward focus on healing, blooming and self-belonging feels especially meaningful when placed beside the rest of her catalog. This is an artist who has sung Lagos as a living archive, Harlem as an African immigrant crossroads and Miriam Makeba as an ancestral force. She has used jazz not as a fixed category but as a flexible language for migration, memory, politics and interior life. Her current era matters because it does not abandon those larger themes; it distills them. After years of exploring what it means to carry countries, neighborhoods and histories inside the voice, Somi is turning toward the emotional labor of becoming rooted in oneself. That makes the new project feel less like a detour and more like a culmination. It also arrives after a period in which her career reached milestones that changed how she is discussed: the NAACP Image Award win for Petite Afrique, the Grammy nominations for Holy Room and Zenzile, and her expansion into theater with Dreaming Zenzile. Somi has earned the right to make a quieter kind of boldness. This week, that is exactly what makes her worth watching.

Watch Next

• Petite Afrique
• The Lagos Music Salon
• Holy Room: Live at Alte Oper with Frankfurt Radio Big Band
• Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba
• Dreaming Zenzile