I took it for granted as just part of the family, but it was a very early language and a comfortable language for me,” she explains. “Music and singing were natural to me as a child. Monk describes herself as a fourth-generation singer – her mother and her grandfather were both professional vocalists and her great-grandfather was a cantor.
Yet her discovery of how to use the voice as an instrument is almost the opposite of alchemy – it is literally who she is, rooted in the pith of her DNA. What Monk has done with her voice over the years has been likened to magic.
