Vimala Rowe [Charlotte Baladi]

JAZZ, soul and world singer Vimala Rowe – a performer with sell-out shows at Ronnie Scott’s, 606 Club and the London Jazz Festival – said her motto from childhood has always been “pressure makes diamonds”, and it’s allowed her to overcome challenges in her life and career.

She was born in Chelsea but was fostered at birth, moving to Weymouth for three years before being adopted by another family and moving to Leicestershire.

Ms Rowe said her experience in the East Midlands in the early 1980s was not easy, being the only black girl in her school for some time.

She said: “Growing up in a small village in Leicestershire was really difficult, it wasn’t easy. I realised at 14 that I had been racially abused every day, it was just a common occurrence. It was overtly OK to be like that. I didn’t complain to anyone.

“Music was the thing I related to and the thing that kept me sane in the environment that I grew up in. In the four walls of my room I would listen to Motown.

“I loved Berry Gordy, I loved the melodies, and the strings. I was taken away by that and the beauty of it.

“I think the first record I got was Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Happy House. I was probably thinking be happy.”

She added: “They say the greater the pressure the more beautiful the diamond. Hearing that as a child really stuck with me and helped me understand in a simplistic way that what doesn’t break you makes you stronger.

“And I found that in music, in African American music, and in British soul.

“When I was very young and I wasn’t allowed to play records on my own and when I could I’d get out my parents’ LPs and I’d play Billie Holiday and she absolutely jumped off the vinyl and into my soul. That pain that she gives and then her fighting spirit, she’s giving us something beautiful.”

Ms Rowe travelled for 15 years in Thailand, Singapore, Australia and India, training in Hindustani classical music in Nagpur.

Moving back to the UK in the early 2000s she lived in Lissenden Gardens in Camden and it was around this time she started performing on the jazz circuit and had a chance encounter in Kenwood with guitarist John Etheridge.

Ms Rowe said: “John invited me to his gig and he knew how nervous I was for getting up and singing, but I had a table of 12 of my friends there and John said ‘if you want to, I’ll give the nod and come up’, and that was that, once I was up there it was fine.

“I’ve got this feeling of wanting to hide away, not being good enough but then once I’m on a stage that all changes.”

The two have since collaborated on a number of occasions, from gigs on the Hampstead Heath bandstand to Lauderdale House in Highgate. Ms Rowe said: “I’m so lucky I have that goosebump moment whenever I sing.

“On stage, at Ronnie’s say, that’s amazing because that’s where Ella Fitzgerald stood and she’s my heroine, but I have those moments in the Green Note [Parkway, Camden  Town], in the basement with 30 people sitting there, and you are just absolutely flying.

“Each time I play I feel like I say I feel better than the last.”