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| Photo Credit: Knoor the Luo |
Somi Finds Room to Bloom on New Single “Sometimes Love” Featuring The Cavemen.
GRAMMY-nominated vocalist, songwriter, and genre-bending storyteller Somi is entering a new season with an open heart.
The acclaimed artist has released “Sometimes Love,” featuring Nigerian sibling duo The Cavemen, from her forthcoming album What Does It Take to Bloom?, out August 7 via Salon Africana. Recorded in Lagos, the single is warm, groove-heavy, and full of movement, carrying the heat of highlife, jazz, soul, and African musical memory into a love song that feels both intimate and expansive.
“This song is about keeping an open heart and the possibility of finding love — in all its forms — at any moment in our journey,” Somi shared.
Co-produced by Benjamin James of The Cavemen, What Does It Take to Bloom? finds Somi leaning further into a sound that refuses easy categorization. Written and recorded between Dakar, Lagos, Paris, and New York City, the project explores growth, uncertainty, womanhood, healing, and the quiet courage it takes to become yourself in real time.
For Somi, whose work has long lived at the intersection of Africa and America, place has always mattered. Her music has carried listeners through Harlem, Nigeria, and the political and artistic inheritance of Miriam Makeba. On this new album, the map turns inward.
The album’s earlier single, “We’re All Falling,” confronted mortality and personal loss with uncommon tenderness, offering listeners permission to grieve, breathe, and remain present. “Sometimes Love” answers that ache with possibility.
A vocalist, composer, actor, and playwright, Somi Kakoma is the Midwestern daughter of immigrants from Uganda and Rwanda. Her 2021 GRAMMY nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album made her the first African woman nominated in any of the GRAMMY Awards’ jazz categories. She is also a two-time NAACP Image Award recipient, a Doris Duke Artist Award winner, a TED Senior Fellow, and the founder of Salon Africana.
Her latest chapter follows a Broadway debut in the Tony Award-winning Jaja’s African Hair Braiding and a commission to record her original song “Holy Room” for Carrie Mae Weems’ permanent installation Cool Blue Wind at the Obama Presidential Center.
With What Does It Take to Bloom?, Somi is not asking for permission to belong. She is making the room herself.
Tracklist:
1. Throw Something
2. Sometimes Love (ft. The Cavemen.)
3. What Does It Take to Bloom?
4. Mama On Blooming
5. So You Want to Be a Woman (ft. Lakecia Benjamin)
6. Aiwah
7. Sugar
8. Mama On Tradition
9. Ngayaya
10. Lay It Down
11. Interlude: Skin To Skin
12. We’re All Falling
13. Love Could Be Anywhere
Select Tour Dates:
June 25 - New Haven, CT - International Festival Arts & Ideas
Sept. 17 - Champaign, IL - Krannert Center for Performing Arts
Sept, 18 - Evanston, IL - Space
Sept. 19 - Indianapolis, IN - Jazz Kitchen
Sept. 27 - Saratoga Springs, NY - Skidmore College
Sept. 29 - Madison, WI - Wisconsin Union Theater
Oct. 1 - New York, NY - World Music Institute presents at Sony Hall
Oct. 3 - South Orange, NJ - South Orange Performing Arts Center
Oct. 10 - Denver, CO - Dazzle
Oct. 11 - San Francisco, CA - SFJazz Center
Oct. 12 - Santa Cruz, CA - Kuumbwa
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