Nasimiyu Works to Create Her World

Singing is just the most visible part of what she does, she says.

“I’m doing my own thing / I do just as I please,” Nasimiyu Murumba sings over layers of percussion in the opening bars of dirt., her new EP. The assertion isn’t a boast, nor is it in the mode of a teen pop star trying to explain before defending herself against haters. The song, “Even in the Dark,” is a joyful, uptempo track powered by a belief in herself - a belief that doesn’t require commercial success to feed it since that hasn’t happened yet. 

“Nasimiyu is like the magician,” she says. “She sings about things she wants to come true. “‘The Biggest Drum’? Those are lyrics that are meant as a manifestation. It might sound like a very happy song, but I wrote that song on my worst day. I wrote that song when I felt, I need to sing words of positive affirmation. ‘Even in the Dark’ - I can’t say that every one of those specific things are true, but that’s a world that I want to create and water the seed for.”

dirt. and 2012’s Rules Aren’t Real album were largely made by Nasimiyu (accent on the second syllable), who layered voices, percussion parts, keyboards, and other parts until the songs were finished. She had guests play parts she needed that she couldn’t play - the Naughty Professor horn section performs on one track - but that method of recording makes the album sound contemporary. At the same time, her music draws on a number of musical traditions: hip-hop, jazz, R&B, and poetry most obviously. 

“A lot of my musical inspirations aren’t musicians,” she says, and counts photography and literature as her biggest influences. She only has formal training in one art form - dance - and it’s the one that doesn’t show up in performance. Still, that background has affected her music. “I write as a dancer,” Nasimiyu says. “Studying dance informs my decisions musically. Very little consciousness of music theory and the way that things are supposed to sound, but very much aware of how I want things to feel in this very sensory way.”

Because of that, Nasimiyu takes pride in the construction of her songs and thinks she is misunderstood. “I feel like I’m interpreted as a singer, like I show up and the guys have all the music ready,” she says. “I live in the ideas and making all the arrangements, making all the music. Singing on top of it is like an afterthought.” 

Nasimiyu moved to New Orleans from Minneapolis five years ago, and it has been hard for her to find her place in New Orleans’ musical culture. Her look is distinctive, her energy is youthful, and she’s not afraid to be brashly artful in a city that approaches art from a working class perspective. Even though she performs with a band when she plays live, she hasn’t figured out how to make more of an impression. “I’ve never found one pocket of artists that I totally belonged in,” she says, but she considers that a good thing. “I took a lot from a lot of communities and brought them together - I hope.”

Now, she splits time between New Orleans and New York. “There’s a community for the kind of music I do there,” Nasimiyu says. “For the first three years here, I thought, I’m going to blaze a trail. I’m going to open new doors for weirdo artists like me, and I’m going to make there be more singer/songwriter venues and more indie radio stations, and I took that on as my crusade. I decided I was taking on too much and swimming upstream. In New York, there’s a musical community there that loves these songs and is ready for them.”

That doesn’t mean she has been alone in New Orleans. At times, Nasimiyu has played in as many as eight bands - “That was just right for me, the perfect amount” she says - and she has worked in a number of traditional and commercial bands as well as on her own. “The majority of them were with technically focused musicians,” Nasimiyu says. “A lot of jazzy stuff. A lot of funk stuff. It was like being in free music school.” The musicians she’ll play with this weekend are ones who have been the most supportive over the year. “The people who are playing with me this weekend are the closest thing I have to a circle.”

Nasimiyu will play with Naughty Professor and Yugen on Friday night at One Eyed Jacks, and at the French Quarter Festival Sunday at 2:15 p.m. at the BMI Songwriter Stage at the Historic New Orleans Collection.