Have You Heard Judi Singh? A Gifted Black Punjabi Singer Returns to the Spotlight

By Liam Lacey

Judi Singh was a gifted and beautiful Edmonton-based jazz singer of African American and Punjabi descent. A song stylist with a buoyant clarity to her tone and sophisticated phrasing, Singh recorded and appeared on Canadian television shows in the 1960s and 70s.

A still from Have You Heard Judi Singh?

Though her work is not widely known today, that may be about to change, partly thanks to a new film about her, Have You Heard Judi Singh? which will screen at two Toronto-area festivals over the next few days: the International Film Festival of South Asia on Monday, October 13, and at Reel World Film Festival Saturday, October 18.

Singh’s name is usually linked with her more famous male musical collaborators, including her onetime partner, the guitar virtuoso Lenny Breau with whom she had a daughter; her accompanist and champion Tommy Banks; and the American trumpeter and composer Woody Shaw, with whom she recorded.

Months before Singh passed away in 2021 at the age of 76 after retiring to Victoria, an Edmonton arts council staffer, Poushali Mitra, published an essay on an Edmonton heritage site which put a new spotlight on the singer herself.

Mitra wrote that she had been researching South Asian music in Edmonton and randomly entered the search term “Singh + artist + 70s Edmonton.” That led her Judi Singh and her music, which is available on many vintage YouTube clips, and the “beautiful, calming, jazzy voice comforted my lonely pandemic evenings.”

The essay also explored the history of Black and South Asian communities in Alberta in the early years of the last century. The CBC website wrote a piece about Mitra’s article, bringing her story to national attention.

Singh’s musical stock has been gradually rising in recent years. A new generation of listeners discovered her music, especially her 1970 Tommy Banks’ collaboration, A Time for Love, a CBC album which was re-released on Vancouver’s Magikbus Entertainment in 2018. One cut from that record, the feathery David Foster-penned “Up and Down,” has taken on a life of its own on TikTok as whimsical accompaniment to various animated shorts.

Mitra’s article eventually found its way to filmmaker Baljit Sangra, whose Vancouver-based company Viva Mantra Films focuses on underrepresented voices from the South Asian community in Western Canada.

Filmmaker Baljit Sangra

Her titles include Warrior Boyz (2008), about the Indo-Canadian gang scene in the Lower Mainland; Many Rivers Home (2014), about an assisted living centre for the elderly; Because We Are Girls (2019), dealing with the sexual abuse of three Punjabi-Canadian sisters from Williams Lake in Central BC; and Mareya Shoot, Keetha Goal: Make the Shot (2023) about hockey players of South Asian descent.

Judi Singh’s story was clearly in her wheelhouse, but she didn’t jump in immediately. She spent time contemplating the article, savouring the 1927 photograph of Singh’s parents, the Punjabi father Sohan Singh Bhullar and his Black wife, Effie Jones, as well as the 1970 album cover of Singh’s image on A Time For Love.

Sangra went on her personal deep dive through Spotify and YouTube listening to the singer, including her collaborations with Breau. She wondered why she had not heard of Singh, a common Sikh or Indian last name, and thought: “Wow. What a beautiful voice.”

Eventually, in 2023, she asked her friend, Afghan Canadian filmmaker and producer, Brishkay Ahmed, for advice. Did Judi Singh’s story merit a documentary feature? “She immediately got it, the importance of putting a woman of colour with power back on the cultural landscape. She said, ‘Yeah. Let’s do it.’”

Sanga reached out to Mitra (who appears in the film) as well as others who were close to Singh. As she soon discovered, Singh was far from forgotten but was warmly and vividly remembered by an extended community of friends and family.

They recounted Singh’s beginnings as the youngest of a family of seven, fronting a teenaged pop band that opened for Roy Orbison, her difficult years with Breau and his substance use, her struggles as a single mother, trying to support her family and pursue her career. Wrapping in a tidy 79 minutes, the film is more a collage of voices, memories, and impressions rather than a conventional history.

“My intent was never to do a full biography-type film,” says Sanga. “Its focusing on certain chapters in her life, kind of musical chapters, with some personal elements to tie it together, to provide some complexity and not just be a symbol.”

Singh also gets to tell part of her own story, thanks to a 2004 interviewed recorded by Breau’s biographer, Ron Forbes-Roberts (One Long Tune: The Life and Music of Lenny Breau). To supplement the audio of that interview, Sanga created several scenes of dramatic re-enactment, with a lookalike actress playing Singh, talking to a journalist in a smoky bar.

A principal character in the film is Singh’s daughter Emily Hughes, herself a filmmaker who has made two documentaries about her late father, The Genius of Lenny Breau (co-directed with Shane Theriot) and The Genius of Lenny Breau Remembered (2018), dealing with the aftermath of guitarist’s 1984 murder. The film suggests that Hughes’ focus on her father was a source of tension in her relationship with her mother.

Have You Heard Judi Singh? features many men — musicians, producers, and family members — offering commentary, but scenes with women are more interactive, involving reunions and hugs. In one of those arranged encounters, Hughes meets actor Tantoo Cardinal, who lived at Singh’s house in the seventies.

In another sequence, Hughes travels to Los Angeles to meet with her childhood fried, actor Rae Dawn Chong, whose biological mother, Abigail Toulson, was a friend Singh’s, and who talks about the frustrations of an artist and woman of colour and the power of what Chong calls “Canadian Black women’s magic.”

For those who want to hear Judi Singh sing, the film also includes 18 excerpts of her performances on record and on television, along with selections from Lenny Breau and others, an appetizer for music lovers who, no doubt, will want to hear Judi sing more.

Have You Heard Judi Singh? screens at the International Film Festival of South Asia on October 13, 5:30 pm at Cineplex Cinemas Courtney Park (tickets here) and at ReelWorld Film Festival on October 18, 6:30 pm at the Paradise Theatre (tickets here). The film can also be screened at the Vancouver Black Independent Film Festival (Oct. 30-Nov. 1) and the Vancouver Asian Film Festival (Nov. 6-16) before becoming available for streaming on the British Columbia’s provincial broadcaster, The Knowledge Network.