I felt that it was something very important for you.

You know, Makhtar, I am a woman, and I have always been very sensitive about the position of the woman in the jazz world or the position of the woman in life and how we are treated.

And so this is something that I am just now really seeing is that my whole life, I have always been a defender of the woman and the woman in the space and the female rights and, uh, very conscious of the injustices and the inequalities that I see for women in any space, but in particular in the jazz space because that's my world.

You know, the inequality in pay and just the way that women are treated, and I have tried to strengthen young women.

I created a program called the Woodshed Network with my oldest daughter, who does my management.

Her name is Tulani Bridgewater Kowalski.

And, uh, together we created this program, the Woodshed Network, which we had for four years.

You are living your songs.

And you were able to really, for me, bring that common spirit that people don't necessarily see between these two parts of the world.

Well, you know, Mata, for me, that whole project was born out of a personal search of mine to find my African ancestry.

So I decided I wanted to visit Mali.

It was because the music that a musician who was working with me, Ira Coleman, would play for me, all of these Malian albums or Senegalese albums, and I... would know the melodies of a lot of these griot songs.

I could sing along, and it just, it was in my head.

I knew these melodies.

So I decided I needed to get a better understanding of that, and that's when I had hooked up with Shake, Titty, and Sec.

But tell me, how did you come to work with FAO and support the fight against ANGA?

When you sing, I Wish I Knew Half As Before, have you changed the tempo on it?

Um...

I do it with more of a gospel tinge.

And so, yes, it's a different tempo than the way that Nina recorded it.

And because that's just how I hear it.

And I sing the two songs back to back.

I sing Mississippi Goddamn first.

you go.