Tamara Jade is an artist who refuses to shrink her voice to fit the room. A Maryland-born vocalist with gospel roots, classical training from Oberlin, and a résumé that moves effortlessly from The Voice to A Black Lady Sketch Show, she has built a career on embracing every part of who she is. Comedy, opera, R&B, musical theatre, church, storytelling — she carries it all with her. These aren’t contradictions, but one complete living instrument. Now starring in Jeanine Tesori’s Blue at Lincoln Center, Tamara is stepping into a role that meets her at the intersection of truth, faith, and fearlessness. And on a recent evening inside the Lincoln Center rehearsal hall, that fullness was impossible to miss.
We had just finished taking photos in the rehearsal hall at Lincoln Center and stepped out into the cool evening. The glow from the building washed over us as we crossed toward The Smith to meet her manager. Our conversation carried easily from the rehearsal hall to the street, shifting from laughter to a shared meditation on what music feeds us now.
Tamara stopped mid-stride and laughed. “We have to be honest with ourselves. Some of this music out right now just isn’t made for us. We’re not the target audience. And that’s okay. We want to be, but we’re not.. Because we have standards.” She laughed again, the kind of full-body laugh that makes you laugh too. “It’s catchy, it’s doing what it needs to do, but we’re grown. We need something we can feel. We need meat.”
It was classic Tamara—funny, unfiltered, and deeply perceptive. Beneath the joke was her constant search for meaning, for truth that resonates.
She grew up in church and trained in classical voice and sociology at Oberlin Conservatory, and that mixture of spiritual grounding and disciplined study lives in everything she does. When asked when she first realized her voice could hold all those worlds at once, she said, “I always knew. When I went to Oberlin, the first thing I told my teacher was, ‘I don’t want to sing opera.’ She looked at me like she had seen a ghost. I told her, ‘I just want to learn how to sing properly. I want good technique for whatever I want to sing.’ I always knew that I could, but college was where I really started to stretch out. That’s where I learned jazz and leaned into opera. I already knew gospel and R&B, but college was when I started doing it all at once.”
That openness to possibility is still how she defines herself. “These days, I tell people I’m a vocalist. I used to say ‘entertainer,’ but ‘vocalist’ feels right. People forget that it’s a real thing. There are folks who use their voices in all kinds of ways—singing, recording, voiceover, sketch comedy. When I did sketch, I changed my voice instead of my body. I could shift my accent, tone, and rhythm to create different people. All of that is vocal work. That’s part of what makes me who I am.”
As she talked, her pace slowed slightly, and her tone softened as she described the rituals that center her before performing. “God and music,” she said. “Just talking to God and centering myself. Sometimes I listen to what I’m about to sing, but most of the time I just listen to what I want to. It might be gospel. It might be D’Angelo—I’ve been on a D’Angelo kick. It might be Doja Cat. Whatever I’m feeling that day. And I pray too. I know it sounds cliché, but I really do pray. My prayer is that love and light go before me, and peace and joy follow, so I’m sandwiched in love, light, peace, and joy. Then I can leave knowing I gave what I came to give.”
At the moment, she is starring in Blue at Lincoln Center, Jeanine Tesori’s contemporary opera about a Black family navigating grief, faith, and community after police violence. “I knew about this opera years ago when the Washington National Opera did it,” she said. “I didn’t know Jeanine then. I just knew the person playing the son. I read about it and thought, Oh, an opera about police brutality. Cool, they’re getting progressive out here. Then, when this came up, I was like, Oh, it’s that opera. And first of all, anything attached to Jeanine’s name, I’m down to do, because I trust it will be both rigorous and rewarding.”
Her expression turned thoughtful. “One of the reasons I stopped singing opera was because I didn’t want to sing about magic and flutes anymore. Real things are happening in the world where my feet touch the ground. No shade to the classics, but they were very Eurocentric and not rooted in the world we live in. And all the other music I love—gospel, R&B, hip-hop—it’s all grounded in reality. ‘They Not Like Us’ by Kendrick Lamar, that’s based on real things, real conflict, real emotion. So there’s no reason opera can’t be that too. The fact that there are people like Jeanine making work that reflects the times, just like Nina Simone told us to, is what made me say yes. And also,” she said with a smile, “a girl always needs a job.”
She described what makes Blue different from anything she has done before. “This is the first time I get to bring musical theater into opera. For so long, it’s been keeping them separate—one or the other. But this time, I get to use everything. I’m painting the text in my chest and in my mix, not doing the whole thing in an operatic voice. I finally get to use all the parts of my voice in one piece. I’m not muting one and elevating another. Everything is working together.”
That sense of integration carries through all her work, including her time as Effie White in Dreamgirls, opposite Joy Woods as Deena. “That show taught me how to carry a story and how to close the book,” she said. “If I carried Effie’s story around all day, I would be downtrodden. You have to step out of it. I think sometimes we love our art so much that we become it, and we forget where it ends and we begin. That show taught me to pace myself. It’s still the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Effie sings tenor when the group sings, so you go from squalling at the top of your voice to singing lower harmonies right after. It’s exhausting.”
Her solution was as technical as it was spiritual. “To make it my own, I didn’t rely on power; I relied on storytelling. Where others might belt, I would belt and run, because for us a good run—clean, centered, and in tune—moves people just as much as a belt. That’s our language as Black artists. That’s how I made it mine.”
Between the worlds of opera and theater, she said she feels most at home in the middle. “I spent ten years in opera, and this is the first time in a long time I’ve been in a room where everyone speaks the same musical language. The casting for Blue feels like friends, like we’ve known each other for years. Maybe that’s why it feels like home.”
Her background in comedy adds an extra dimension onstage. “Comedy taught me timing,” she said. “It helps me catch little moments that aren’t on the page. A look, a breath, a beat—it makes the story feel alive. I don’t add words, but I bring those instincts from comedy with me. They help me read a room and keep the audience connected.”
That ability to connect also shapes how she chooses her projects. “I don’t take work where I can’t see myself in the story,” she said. “In Blue, I have brothers. I’m the only girl in my family. The police talk is real. The fear for the Black men in your life to come home safe is real. Dreamgirls—being overlooked, not fitting how they want you to look—that’s real too. Even The Voice. Everything I sang there was something I would sing in my own show. I still sing ‘Higher Ground.’ It’s funky, it’s fun, and I can church it. Everything I do has to be real to me.”
Then she said, “Every story doesn’t have to be rooted in trauma. I love shows like Abbott Elementary. I want to see more of that—more whimsy, more joy, more silly. We don’t need a white savior in every story just because they paid for the project. Let’s build our own capital so we can tell our own stories.”
Before going inside, she named the women who move her. “Angela Birchett. Ayana George. Kecia Lewis,” she said. “Ayana especially. People think her success came out of nowhere, but she’s been doing the work for years. Watching her finally be right where she belongs is inspiring. Angela told me when I moved here, ‘Learn everything I do because you’re going to do it,’ and she was right. And Kecia Lewis in Hell’s Kitchen—her performance made me sit up straight. It called to the artist in me to operate at my highest capacity. That’s what I want to keep chasing.”
Then she added, laughing a little at the memory, “And Kara Young—she’s that girl. I met her at Black Women on Broadway with you. I didn’t know much about her, and you said, ‘She’s going to win a Tony this year.’ And then she did. And then she won another one! I was like, girl, I don’t know what you’re over there doing, but it’s working.”
She thought for a second, then said, “And Tamika Lawrence in Oh, Happy Day—I was so moved by how she used every part of herself. The body was tea, but beyond that, she was mesmerizing. She acted, she was funny, and then forty-five minutes in, she sang, and I was like, wait, you’ve got that voice in there too? That’s the kind of artist I love to watch.”
When asked what she hopes people associate with her name, she said, “Freedom. I want people to see me and think, that girl is free. And then ask themselves how they can get a little freer. Whether it’s your art, your money, your love life, or where you live, be free. Go live somewhere else for a while. Don’t let anyone convince you it’s not possible.”
The mention of Jeanine Tesori brought a smile back to her face. “Jeanine is like working with my future self,” she said. “She doesn’t take things too seriously, but when she speaks, everyone listens. She meets people where they are. Today she showed the cast how to talk to my belly because I’m pregnant. She came up and did the little zerbert thing, and I was like, yes, that’s exactly it. I want to be that kind of woman—kind, funny, real. I know God sent her to me to pull out the part I’ve been protecting. She welcomes all of me.”
As the restaurant door opened and the warmth spilled out, she turned back for a moment. “I love Broadway Black,” she said. “I’ve been following it since before I moved here. I always knew when I got to New York, I wanted to be a part of this. You built something that makes people feel seen. I’m here for the long haul.”
Her words lingered like music as we stepped inside, laughter from the dining room rising to meet us. Tamara Jade carries every world she’s touched—church, conservatory, comedy, opera—and somehow they all sound like her.
