[Cover photo credit to Knoor the Luo]
Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Somi has announced her new album What Does It Take to Bloom?, arriving on August 7, 2026, via Salon Africana. A two-time NAACP Image Award winner and Doris Duke Artist Award recipient, this marks Somi’s first collection of original songs in six years. The album is “an exploration into the ongoing process of staying faithful to oneself amid life’s dissonance.”
Written and recorded between Dakar, Lagos, Paris and New York City, the album has a global and a meditative sensibility, and asks “whether growth is something we recognize as it’s happening, or once we’ve already been transformed.”
Somi has shared the first album single “We’re All Falling,” which confronts mortality. Written during a time of personal loss, the song “reflects on the sobering awareness that life is fragile and time is finite.” It is also a “call for grace and an invitation to live in the moment.”
When asked about the album, Somi says:
I wrote this body of work while traversing many places and losing many people. This album is a mirror of searching for where and how to take root in spite of that. I pray these songs offer each listener a sense of Home or, at the very least, a witnessing of me coming Home to myself.
Vocalist, composer, actor, and playwright Somi Kakoma is the Midwestern daughter of immigrants from Uganda and Rwanda. She is known in the international Jazz community simply as “Somi.” Her 2021 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album made her the first African woman nominated in any of the Grammy Award’s Jazz categories. Her last album, Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba, was a companion project to the original musical Dreaming Zenzile that Somi also wrote and starred in Off-Broadway as a tribute to the great South African singer and activist.
Somi also holds degrees in Cultural Anthropology and African Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Master’s degree in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and a PhD in Critical Inquiry & Creative Practice from Harvard University.
Select Tour Dates:
Sept. 17 – Champaign, IL – Krannert Center for Performing Arts
Sept, 18 – Evanston, IL – Space
Sept. 19 – Indianapolis, IN – Jazz Kitchen
Sept 27 – Saratoga Springs, NY – Skidmore College
Sept 29 – Madison, WI – Wisconsin Union Theater
Oct 1 – New York, NY – World Music Institute presents at Sony Hall
Oct 10 – Denver, CO – Dazzle
Oct 11 – San Francisco, CA – SFJazz Center
Oct 12 – Santa Cruz, CA – Kuumbwa
Additional dates to be added.
