Anna had not planned to sing in public that afternoon. The Ghana-born, Texas-raised New Yorker was simply passing by when Reggie, a street musician with a guitar, asked if she wanted to share a song. What followed was an unrehearsed, full-throated performance of ‘Summertime’ on a city sidewalk that stopped people mid-step and left both performer and musician describing the same feeling afterward: lifted.
What ‘Summertime’ actually means, according to Anna
Before a single note was played, Anna did something most people skip. She explained the song. ‘Summertime’ comes from Gershwin’s opera ‘Porgy and Bess,’ she told Reggie, and for her it carries a specific weight. ‘It’s about resiliency,’ she said. ‘It’s about overcoming, and it’s a part of American history.’ Reggie admitted he had not thought about the song that way before, and Anna offered the reason jazz holds up so well across generations: interpretation belongs to the listener. ‘That’s my interpretation,’ she said, ‘and if you hear the lyrics, maybe you’ll feel that way, too.’
What she then did with those lyrics was something else entirely. Her voice moved through the verses with a control that made the old standard feel immediate, not nostalgic. The pedestrian world around them kept moving, but something in the sonic space she created made it feel smaller and quieter at the same time.
After the last note, Reggie asked how she felt. ‘I feel lifted,’ Anna said. ‘I feel really good. You’re doing a wonderful thing.’
A second song, and a bit more of Anna’s story
The two did not stop there. Anna chose a second song: Bill Withers’ ‘Lovely Day.’ While Reggie found the chords, Anna shared that her name was given to her in honor of both of her grandmothers, one from her father’s side and one from her mother’s. She returns to Ghana every year, she said, and ‘Lovely Day’ brought both occasions to mind at once: the specific afternoon on that sidewalk, and the general luck of being alive to enjoy it.
Her performance of ‘Lovely Day’ built louder than ‘Summertime,’ and by the final chorus there was cheering. When Reggie asked again how she felt, Anna landed the line cleanly: ‘I feel like the world’s a little bit brighter. How about that? It’s a lovely day.’
The two discovered, almost by accident, that they both favor the color blue. Anna pointed to her outfit, Reggie gestured at his guitar. ‘Twinsies,’ Anna said, and both laughed.
A self-described jazz baby who sings around the city
Anna described herself as a jazz baby at heart and said she sings around New York regularly, though not on a formal stage. ‘A lot of people don’t know jazz,’ she said, which is part of why she finds songs like ‘Summertime’ worth sharing. She did put her contact information with Reggie before the first song began, which, given what came next, seemed like a reasonable thing for anyone nearby to want.
Anna walked away from that corner with the same gift she had handed everyone around her: a few minutes of a city afternoon that felt, against the usual odds, genuinely easy.
