Autumn Rowe

Warm and soothing like the lazy after glow of summer. Bluesy and poignant, foreshadowing the painful chill of winter. Autumn, the season. Autumn, the artist.The perfect moniker for a singer/songwriter whose soulful expression embodies the full gamut of the constantly changing elements around us.Sheltered from the rough and tumble neighborhood of her native South Bronx by her family's nurturing musical influence, Autumn's earliest memories are of a small apartment where sounds, rhythm and soul literally bounced off the walls day and night."My dad played the piano and I tried to play, too when I was about 3. But what I really remember was standing on a milk crate in the middle of the room, singing for the family while he played" remembers Autumn."Also my grandmother who I lived with until I was 4 was a gospel singer. She sang in the Cotton Club with Nat King Cole. She was a truly amazing singer. My dad also played the flute and my mom played the guitar, so I think music just seeped into me by osmosis!"However, even at such an early age, her fragile world had already begun to unravel. Autumn’s mother is white, and her father, black. The relationship caused her mother’s family to disown her. When the marriage eventually collapsed, Autumn’s mother found herself a poor, Jewish single parent living in a South Bronx tenement building with a biracial daughter to support and no family or close friends to help her make it through the hard times.A whirlpool of conflicting emotions spun around Autumn in those formative years: abandonment, the need of a father figure and not belonging. However overpowering those were, the unbreakable bond she shared with her mother, her strong sense of self and an almost spiritual devotion to music.Selected for the gifted student program at the S. Bronx's Elijah D. Clarke school, Autumn excelled in creative writing in the class room. Outside of it, she excelled in soaking up the smorgasbord of musical influences her mother brought to her ears."My mom was heavily in to Stevie Wonder, Carol King, Aretha. All the good stuff. It's funny because I wouldn't listen to the current songs on the radio. As for MTV forget it. That didn't exist in the ghetto! At least not when I was growing up, so all I heard was my mom's records and these great singers and songs."Autumn's musical education continued apace as she sang with a number of top-rung gospel choirs in the New York area. It all contributed to form the emotive, soulful instrument that is her voice. Her alto, warm and thick like molasses, her soprano, fluid and agile like a seagull on a cushion of air.With a rare ability that allows her to sail effortlessly between octaves, her tone, inviting and expressive, makes believers out of cynics.As a member of the NYCHA choir, Autumn performed the British Rock Symphony with the Who’s Roger Daltry, Phoebe Snow and Peter Frampton and Radio City Music Hall and the Beacon Theater. Her backing band for the shows were the famed Ray Chew and The Crew. Her solo was Lisa Lisa’s “All Cried Out”. Ironically, Autumn would end up writing songs for her five years later, while doing session work for dance music producers.Enmeshed in the constant flurry of activity that is the New York session scene, Autumn met and befriended DC musician/producer Tyrone Johnson. The two additionally taught an after school program near Ground Zero. In between classes they started writing songs and formed a band with a tight knit crew of talented downtown musicians, becoming a regular fixture in the city’s highly competitive live R&B music scene.“I had a very distinct vision of how the music we wrote should sound” says Autumn, in soft, laid back tones. “I knew that I couldn’t do a bunch of demos and simply present them to a major record company only for them to say, ‘well you need to sound like Beyonce or Ciara or whoever happens to be hot at the moment and we need you to work with this name producer or that name producer." Her collaboration with Tyrone resulted in "Love Child," a first cd still in the making and produced by noted neo-soul producer, Scott Jacoby, and mixed by the veteran Grammy winning engineer, Dave Darlington (Whitney Houston, Patti LaBelle, Wayne Shorter, Masters At Work). A few samples from that session are included on this site.Says Autumn: “I believe that if I'm staying true to who I am, being the best singer and songwriter I can, then the rest, whatever that may be, will fall in to place. I put my heart and soul into “Love Child” and I believe in the lasting power of great music. Trends, and fashions in music tend to change like the weather."And rest assured, like the season after which she's named, Autumn, is destined to stick around.