PaviElle French was only 5 years old when she sang in front of an audience for the first time. It was at Maxfield Elementary School in the heart of St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood, where her mother, musician Zula Young, was working as a teacher.
"I remember singing 'Lift Every Voice and Sing,' you know, the Black national anthem, and the applause was so great in that moment," French recalled. "My mom was beaming with pride and I just felt like, wow, that was for me!"
Within a few short years of that auspicious debut, she performed for Maya Angelou at the Basilica of St. Mary with the City Songs youth choir (she remembers Angelou turning around and blowing her a kiss) and received a scholarship to study piano and voice at Walker West Academy, where she learned from one of the school's founders, Grant West.
Looking back on it now, French realizes how seminal those early opportunities were for her artistic journey. Now 37 years old, she has been performing for over 30 years and has established herself in the Twin Cities as a powerhouse vocalist, a poignant songwriter, a respected recording artist and actor and a budding composer.
This summer, she's bringing it full circle with a bold, unprecedented series of concerts and youth-oriented workshops. She'll kick things off Sunday with the premiere of her latest composition, The SOVEREIGN Suite, a commission for the Schubert Club. She'll be accompanied at the Fitzgerald Theater by musicians who have supported her throughout her career and a string ensemble from her alma mater, Walker West.
"I've always held Walker West near and dear to my heart," she said over dinner between rehearsals. The SOVEREIGN Suite is partly inspired by French's own experiences growing up in the rich Black cultural community of Rondo and her hope for the generations coming up behind her.
"I wanted the kids to be able to play in this because I'm talking about the kids in this piece," she said. "And I wanted to have that extension to where I came from."
The commission builds on French's powerful, poignant album "SOVEREIGN," which she self-released last fall. In songs like "Hard Truths," "Rights" and "Code Switch," she transitions easily between soul, jazz and hip-hop, and takes an unflinching look at the racism and oppression she's faced as a Black woman navigating the predominantly white artistic community in the Twin Cities.
"I'm tired of being used and tokenized," she said, sighing. She sees her summer-long residency, which she's calling "Liberation! Lifting Up Our Youth," as a way to reimagine the way white-led organizations can collaborate with Black artists — and the way her own grant funding can be funneled directly back into the community that has supported artists like her.
The residency is a unique collaboration among seven different cultural organizations. French got the idea for "Liberation" while meeting with the American Composers Forum, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Schubert Club at the end of 2020, while simultaneously learning that she had had been awarded the prestigious Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for 2021-22.
At that meeting, she shared her vision to host a residency that would not only allow her to unveil ambitious, genre-expansive new work, but to collaborate in an organic way with three arts organizations she believes in — Walker West, the Prince-inspired youth music camp Purple Playground and the spoken-word and hip-hop incubator TruArtSpeaks. Each is receiving seed money from French to fund their work, and students from each of the three programs will receive free tickets to her performances this summer in addition to having the opportunity to collaborate directly with French in workshops and concerts.
She said the past two years of pandemic-fueled social upheaval helped to clarify her mission.
"Especially with the racial unrest, and George Floyd's murder and Breonna Taylor and all these things that continue to happen here, I was like, there has to be something that we do that's not just me going into the community and doing a show," she said. "Because the babies can't eat art, you know?"
French hopes to facilitate conversations with the students in addition to collaborating with them artistically.
"I want to have some real dialogue with the babies of all ranges, from elementary, middle school, high school, all the way up into young adulthood," she said. "I want to gauge their thoughts and understand what it is that they're feeling, and that they're thinking, at this time in our cities. Because nobody's talking to them in a real way and giving them the platform to be heard."
In addition to completing her own new compositions, French is also working closely with the American Composers Forum to create curricula that could help other artists replicate this kind of work with youth in the future.
"These big organizations always want to do something new, something to reinvent the wheel, but people are already doing the work," French said. "No matter how you want to show up as the expert in the room, you're not. And so the best way you can give is through the resources that you have.
"Being able to launch this residency and have these young people all meet, come to one of my shows, be able to spend time together, and be able to connect to the actual people who run these programs for further resources for further financial assistance — I think this could very well change the way that these organizations launch these residencies with artists," she said.
French's residency has been a year and half in the making, but she said it's actually the culmination of her decades of creative evolution.
"I am stepping into my true self," she says. "As Black people, we've been vying for so many things for so long. And we can do this — we can build a life of healing from the atrocities and doing something different, so that our everyday lives aren't inundated with racism and classism.
"COVID taught me a lot about self-sustaining, and I'm in a different spirit now," she said. "I feel like I'm debuting not just my work, but how serious and how real I am about liberation."
PaviElle French and Friends debut The SOVEREIGN Suite
7:30 p.m. May 22, Fitzgerald Theater, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul, $27.50-$32.50, all ages.
PaviElle French and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra debut Sands of Time
8 p.m. June 10, 8 p.m. June 11, 2 p.m. June 12, Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, 345 Washington St., St. Paul, sold out.
