Sony Classical is proud to release the new album by Jessye Norman, one of the world’s most famous and respected sopranos. For this long-awaited recording she has chosen not to perform arias from the operatic roles that brought her untold triumphs from a very early age in opera houses ranging from La Scala, Milan, to London’s Covent Garden. With Roots: My Life, My Song, Jessye Norman recalls her African-American origins. Alongside gospel songs and numbers from Africa she also performs jazz songs for the first time in her career. “I wanted to sing something that really inspired me. These are songs that have accompanied me all my life, songs by Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and others.”

The album opens with African Drum Invocation, the magical drumbeats of which recall her West African forebears. With famous spirituals and traditional songs such as Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, Jessye Norman turns back the clock to the time when she sang in a gospel choir in her native city of Atlanta, Georgia. With Mack the Knife and My Baby Just Cares For Me, she also pays tribute to great jazz singers, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone: “They were women of courage, daring and astonishing talent.”

These same qualities have been applied to Jessye Norman, too, of course, ever since she won the ARD Competition in 1968 and was launched on a major operatic career. It is no wonder, then, that audiences and critics alike acclaimed this engaging prima donna, who is completely lacking in a diva’s airs and graces.

In Summer 2010 Jessye Norman will be performing Roots: My Life, My Song at a number of prestigious jazz festivals across Europe, including Montreux in Switzerland and Gijon in Spain, accompanied by a distinguished jazz quintet.