Lalah Hathaway

The daughter of the great Donny Hathaway, Lalah Hathaway made a good impression with her self-titled debut recording in 1990. She not only displayed poise, confidence, and good technique, but was also versatile enough to do more than just light urban contemporary ballads. Her stage shows included jazz, pre-rock pop, and even gospel, and Hathaway later appeared on BET doing jazz and fusion. After her second and final album for Virgin, 1994′s A Moment, she went on a lengthy hiatus, returning in 1999 with Joe Sample for The Song Lives On (GRP). The following decade and into the 2010s she released Outrun the Sky (Sanctuary, 2004), Self Portrait (Stax, 2008), and Where It All Begins (Stax, 2011) — all fine albums involving collaborations with the likes of Mike City, Rahsaan Patterson, Rex Rideout, and Dre & Vidal. They established Hathaway as one of the finest adult contemporary R&B vocalists of the 2000s and 2010s. A 2013 collaboration with the band Snarky Puppy — on a cover of Brenda Russell’s “Something” — won a 2014 Grammy Award in the category of Best R&B Performance. The following year, thanks to her role in Robert Glasper Experiment’s update of Stevie Wonder’s “Jesus Children of America,” Hathaway picked up the Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance. She then recorded and released Live. A document of back-to-back sets recorded at Los Angeles’ Troubadour, the same venue her father played in 1971 — as heard on the first side of his 1972-released album of the same title — it was released in 2015. A version of “Little Ghetto Boy” took the 2016 Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance. Led by the single “Honestly,” Hathaway’s following studio album of the same name arrived in November 2017. ~ Ron Wynn & Andy Kellman