00:01It's my fourth year in a row. I've been coming here since 2023 and it never ceases to just make
00:08my heart sing. I look forward to getting here and after two years of taking a break from the public
00:14eye, I didn't know what was going to bring me back to the stage until I came here in 2023
00:19and it was the Australian audiences that enabled me to find that joy once again and so I've been coming
00:26back ever since.
00:26So since I'm the only person in the world that calls Nina Simone mom, it doesn't make me any different
00:33than the average child of a parent. So it had its ups and downs and I often say I made
00:40the mistake of growing up because I feel like my mother at a certain point in my evolution as a
00:48young lady was challenged by me and my skin color, my features,
00:55her own insecurity with her own skin color and wide features based on where she was raised and the wounds
01:04that she sustained coming up, being told she was too dark or, you know, too this, too that.
01:12My father was very light-skinned and so when I was born, I didn't have those same features and so
01:19oftentimes she would look at me on certain days and she would see the demons that she was facing and
01:24she would take it out on me.
01:26So, you know, that's just one of the examples sometimes of what it could be like and I had to
01:32learn how to understand that I was not responsible for that and that has helped to free me in a
01:40lot of ways.
01:41It's been 23 years since my mother passed away and a lot can take place in that amount of time.
01:49I'm no longer grieving and when Big Band came into my life in 2008, much to my surprise, it was
01:59all about giving honor to my mother because most of the music that I liked of hers was Big Band.
02:04So it was a natural progression and so once I really got past the notion of, well, okay, we won't
02:10be doing your music the way you imagined, Lisa.
02:12Let's see what we can do in the world of Big Band.
02:15That's where the homage to my mother was really born.
02:19I'm enjoying celebrating this legacy.
02:22It's the heaviness is no longer there.
02:25The best of my mother lives on in me and so I have the opportunity to stand upon her shoulders
02:32and to bring forth this legacy from a place of joy and celebration and to share that with the various
02:39audiences and I'm having a good time and they are too.
02:42As a matter of fact, cancer runs on my mother's side of the family so she lost her father and
02:47her eldest sister, who was a mother figure to her, to cancer.
02:50So my mother's cancer was diagnosed at the age of 60.
02:55My mother had gone in for a biopsy and when she awakened from that, they had removed her breasts.
03:02So she did not know that she had lost her breasts in the decision.
03:10And so I fell to my knees literally when I got the call because I knew where her mind was
03:16going to go.
03:16And she was in France at the time.
03:19So within 72 hours, I landed in France.
03:22And when I got to her home, I found out that she'd raised so much hell, that's my mom, at
03:30the hospital that they had to release her early.
03:33So when I got there, she still had tubes coming out of her breasts.
03:37She was still on morphine.
03:39But there was a lethargy to her that had nothing to do with her physical condition and everything to do
03:46with her mind.
03:47And I remember knowing that I have to get to her somehow.
03:54And at some point, I said to her, do you want to live or do you want to die?
03:58Because she was giving people so much hell.
04:00I'm like, they're not responsible for what's happening right now.
04:04So do you want to live or do you want to die?
04:06And I remember she kind of looked at me.
04:08I really had her attention at that point.
04:10And she blinked a few times and she said, I want to live.
04:13I said, okay, now that we've established that, let's have a real conversation.
04:16You're not the only person in the world who's got cancer.
04:19There are support groups.
04:20Write a song about it.
04:21I need you to want to live.
04:24And I need you to live.
04:26And I need you to say to me, I will live.
04:31And she had to think about it, much to my, I was like, you really have to think about this
04:37right now?
04:37I was like, okay, if you don't want to do it for you, can you do it for me?
04:40And by the time, just before I got on the plane, after she found out she'd be under chemo and
04:45radiation,
04:47she looked at me and said, I'll do it for you.
04:49And she lived for six more years.
04:52You
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