Atlanta Symphony Hall
Atlanta, GA – USA
May 23, 2025
Baby Rose, vocalist (with backup band of keyboard, guitar, bass, and drums).
Mike Shaw | 27 MAY 2025
May is the month of jazz in Atlanta, this year, the 48th in a row, hosting what has matured into the nation’s largest and longest-running free jazz festival. From bars and restaurants throughout the month to the culminating three-day Memorial weekend in Piedmont Park, Atlanta Jazz Fest 2025 featured a long and varied roster of notables, from Coltrane family heir Ravi to Atlanta’s own composer-arranger-trumpeter Russell Gunn, and concluding with local favorite, The Joe Gransden Big Band.
Each year, the official weekend festival gets started with a Friday night opening concert at Symphony Hall. And this year’s opening act of the opening concert, Baby Rose, set the tone for the weekend with a set of originals capitalizing on her big voice and emotion-packed delivery.
Baby Rose, born Jasmine Rose Wilson, draws comparisons bracketed by Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin but most appropriately to Nina Simone and her rapid, low-register vibrato. While the big voice emanating from her tiny frame is the vehicle, emotion is her calling card, “smoke-filled ballads” reflecting her own admitted vulnerability. “I make music to help myself get through things,” she says.
Indeed, her creations, often spirited in tempo and always soul-searching in lyrics, are delivered by a voice both sultry and powerful. You wouldn’t call her genre jazz if you consider improvisation the cornerstone attribute of jazz. The arrangements were tight, restricted at times by pre-recorded vocal harmonies, and bereft of any extended solos by her backup of keyboard, guitar, bass, and drums. Nor would you label it hip-hop, though the songs’ talking-singing structures and driving funk rhythms speak of some influence there. Her attire says grunge, but her music denies that characterization as well. What rings through and true is a voice riddled with emotion, a pleading for love and substance so earnest and impassioned that, at times, she was on her knees.
It might be hard to imagine that at 30 years young, Baby Rose has amassed the experience to write and sing those pleas. But not so hard to be taken in by her commitment and voice. From soft and sultry to rhapsodic and fierce, hers was a dynamic, versatile performance that was heartily applauded by an admiring audience and provided an appropriate introduction to the 2025 version of the Atlanta Jazz Festival. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Baby Rose: babyrose.art
- Atlanta Jazz Festival: atljazzfest.com
Read more by Mike Shaw.
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