Beneath the Skin of Sorrow: Improvisations on Loss
Nnenna Freelon
Duke University Press
Part love story, part homage to jazz, and part guide to creative practice within bereavement, Beneath the Skin of Sorrow follows Freelon’s difficult and personal journey to healing. Calling on the improvisational skills that she had built over her forty-year career as a jazz singer, Freelon crafted a new reality by improvising—thinking about grieving as a series of small, daily engagements with the world around her. By improvising a new life, Freelon forged a new companionship between grief, art, and daily life.
In the essays, poems, lyrics, and explorations of jazz standards that comprise this lyrical and elegiac memoir, Freelon shows how thinking about grief as an exercise in improvisation can lead to a creative coexistence with grief in all its forms.