We Speak Music

NoteSpeak (In a Word) Arrives as the Trilogy’s Most Ambitious Statement

Published

6 months ago

April 27, 2026

Emily

Lisa Marie Simmons and Marco Cremaschini have spent the better part of a decade building toward this moment. Their third album under the NoteSpeak banner lands as something fully formed, a record that moves between jazz, spoken word, electronica, and hip hop with the ease of artists who’ve spent years learning how to talk to each other across those genre lines.

Simmons came up writing and performing in New York before settling in Italy. Cremaschini brings a deep European jazz vocabulary. Together they’ve created what’s being called a global jazz hybrid, though that term barely covers the ground. What actually happens across these thirteen tracks is messier and more alive than any clean descriptor. The music flexes from interior moments to passages that arrive with real heat. The words carry both the personal and political weight equally. It’s the kind of record that assumes you’re paying attention.

The album opens with Christof Bernhard’s gong work on “Intro” and immediately signals that this isn’t going to sit still. Gillian Margot, the Toronto vocalist who’s shared stages with Sting and Robert Glasper, takes the lead on “Once Upon This Time”. Jamaaladeen Tacuma, whose bass work has been foundational to avant-garde jazz since his Prime Time days with Ornette Coleman, appears on “Taijitu” alongside Maurizio Giannone and Chanele McGuinness. Vernon Reid of Living Colour brings his unmistakable presence to bookend tracks. Charu Suri, Grammy nominated and the first Indian-born jazz composer to perform at Carnegie Hall, adds something subtle but essential to “Winner Takes All”. Dorian and Nayanna Holley duet on “No Time at All”.

What catches you is “Solid Ground (Meet Me There)” featuring The Flamingos’ Theresa Trigg and Terry Isaiah Johnson. Johnson, a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who arranged the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You,” died on October 8, 2025, twelve days after this album’s release. This is one of his final recordings. It carries weight now that it didn’t before.

The working band is sharp: Simmons anchoring everything, Cremaschini on piano and keyboards, Manuel Caliumi splitting time between alto saxophone and bass clarinet, Marco Cocconi holding down electric bass, Federico Negri on drums. Laura Masotto brings violin to “Submersion”. The tightness you hear is earned. These musicians know how to listen to each other.

This is the third in the NoteSpeak trilogy on Ropeadope Records. The first, “NoteSpeak (Amori e Tragedie in Musica),” landed in 2020. “NoteSpeak 12” arrived in 2023 and won Best Spoken Word Album at the World Entertainment Awards. Simmons’ poem “Last Supper” from that record picked up a Creators of Justice Literary Award shortlist. Now the third installment keeps building. Individual tracks are already placing as finalists in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and semi-finalists in the American Songwriters Song Contest.

DownBeat gave the first album four stars. The second earned five, with J. Poet noting how Simmons moves between singing and speaking with such fluidity that the distance between poetry and music essentially evaporates. DownBeat named it one of their Best Albums of 2023. All About Jazz gave it four stars, with Chris May positioning it as equal-measure top-end poetry and top-end jazz. In a piece that got widely shared, Chris Slawecki traced the lineage back through Ishmael Reed and forward through Queen Latifah, which is the kind of considered frame you rarely see.

The reference points are legion: Nina Simone, Gil Scott-Heron, Fela Kuti, John and Alice Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Marvin Gaye, Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde. Then separately: Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Ani DiFranco. And running through contemporary music: Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding, Vijay Iyer, Rhiannon Giddens, Anderson Paak.

More from We Speak Media:

We Speak Pop

Doja Cat Brings the Tour Ma Vie World Tour to Scotiabank Arena on November 25

Published

51 minutes ago

November 2, 2026

Leo Bodei

Portrait of Doja Cat with long blonde hair against a dark background.

Doja Cat. Photo courtesy of Doja Cat on Instagram.

Doja Cat brings her Tour Ma Vie World Tour to Toronto on Wednesday, November 25, with a 7:30 p.m. show at Scotiabank Arena. It is one of the last stops on the biggest headlining run of her career, and it lands in the middle of a heavy week for the building.

The tour supports Vie, her fifth studio album, released in September 2025. The record is an 1980s inspired turn back toward pop, led by the singles “Jealous Type” and “Gorgeous,” and the live show has been built as a full scale arena production. Latto joins the bill as special guest for the entire North American leg, which runs 31 dates from the October 1 opener in Detroit to the December 1 finale at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Toronto gets the show near the end of the run, with Boston on November 23 before it and Montreal on November 27 after it. By the time she reaches Scotiabank Arena, the production will have played more than twenty North American arenas, on top of earlier legs across Oceania, Asia, Latin America and Europe. Earlier in November the tour also plays Miami, Tampa, Orlando and Atlanta.

Fans have been getting a look inside the tour straight from Doja Cat herself. She has been filming the run on Ray-Ban Meta glasses, posting point of view footage from backstage, soundchecks and life on the road, so the Toronto crowd will see a show that has been documented almost night by night. Tickets for November 25 are on sale through Ticketmaster. With the Garden shows in New York closing the tour one week later, the Toronto date is one of the final chances to see this production before the run wraps.