Naïka brings her diaspora story to Jazz Fest's main stage
The singer behind the global hit 'One Track Mind' performs Monday night, celebrating her composite identity through music.
The day's top stories, food & events — every morning at 7. Unsubscribe anytime.
Naïka, the singer behind the planetary hit 'One Track Mind,' has made it her life's work to celebrate what she calls her "ambiguïté identitaire" — her complex, multi-layered identity drawn from a diaspora that spans the globe.
Hours before headlining the main stage at Montreal's Jazz Festival on Monday night, the 31-year-old sat down behind the big stage at Place des Festivals to talk about her journey. "Where do I belong?" she sings in her song Layers — a question that has driven her since childhood.
Naïka's father, of French nationality, grew up in Madagascar and later met her mother in Haiti. Her father's side carries Lebanese origins; her mother's side is Palestinian. Her own childhood took her through Guadeloupe, Kenya, South Africa, and Vanuatu as her father's finance career moved the family. She was born in Miami.
"I have Cesária Évora, Miriam Makeba, and Rihanna all in my lineage," she said. "But being the keeper of an inheritance this composite hasn't always been simple."
Early in her career, industry gatekeepers told her she was "not marketable" — that people couldn't immediately understand who she was, making her difficult to market. "Longtemps, je me suis sentie comme dans un tourbillon," she recalled. "It was like I never embodied enough of one culture for it to be my thing."
But the enthusiastic recognition of fans who saw themselves in her work changed that. "I felt not only validated, which is not nothing, but it gave a reason to be to my music," she said.
Naïka came to Montreal briefly in 2014 to study music at Concordia University after high school. "I was very lost," she laughed. "But the city was warm."
She's since built her career independently after studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Her 2017 debut marked the start of a "brick by brick" ascent. But One Track Mind — the kompa-infused lead single from her album Eclesia, released in February — has been the breakthrough. The track has already accumulated 15 million streams.
