Someone once told Nerissa Campbell she knew nothing about jazz.
“There were no jazz courses offered in my high school,” she said. “When I auditioned at the Performing Arts University in Australia, they looked at me and were like, ‘You don’t know anything. Go away, come back next year.’ ”
Campbell recalled a high-school trip to the Performing Arts University and remembered falling under the spell of musical theater and jazz. Even then, she knew that’s where she would eventually be. The next year, she was accepted to her dream school by abandoning her classical trumpet skills and auditioning with her voice instead — which she considers a serendipitous choice.
“It was much easier to shake my classical training through my voice,” she said.
Today, years later and far away from her jazz beginnings, Campbell will bring her jazz tunes to the Mill, 120 E. Burlington St., at 9 p.m. She will play with Welsh musician Fflur Dafydd, a singer and fiction writer here as part of the UI International Writing Program.
Although it will be her first time playing in Iowa, she has visited Iowa City for the past eight years with her husband — an Iowa native and UI alum.
“I’m bringing the Aussies over,” she said.
Picture Campbell as a raw, 25-year-old talent, who sold her belongings, got a year-long visa, and moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., with an anxious twist of hopes and nerves. Now picture Campbell singing comfortably in 55 Bar, a Prohibition-era jazz venue in Greenwich Village. It is easy to see that she is now undoubtedly a seasoned performer.
Friend and artist Andrew Zomoza, who has known Campbell for three and a half years, said she stubbornly clings to the jazz standard while also having an affinity with modern narrative. For him, the disjunction works.
“I was first intrigued by how she held up certain old-school elements of jazz while making them new,” Zomoza said. “She’s in that Billie Holiday mold, even though the Billie era is long gone.”
Friend and fellow musician Josh Graham, who has toured with Campbell and his doom-metal band, Storm of Light, echoed Zomoza.
“I think she is pushing the boundaries of traditional jazz and making it her own thing,” he said.
Graham and Zomoza use words such as mysterious, elegant, and woozy to describe her voice, but Campbell distinguishes it as a moody, indie-jazz sound.
She hopes to soon reconnect with the trumpet she left behind in Australia and envisions playing her instrument in future performances.
“I just bought an old trumpet from an auction,” she said. “It’s a 1923 alto trumpet — just like the jazz greats loved to play. I’m hoping to reacquaint myself with it.”
Campbell meanders through the songwriter experience by blending personal and outside observations to create her tunes.
“I don’t like to describe exactly what my lyrics are about because I think it takes something away from the songs,” she said. “It’s really nice that a song can be a certain something to a listener that it wasn’t originally for me.”