Qamil Wright traverses time and space in launching the Ohio R&B Music Festival

Qamil Wright will be able to do a bit of time traveling when the inaugural Ohio R&B Music Festival she founded unfolds at Natalie’s Grandview on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 5 and 6.

Saturday’s artist showcase, for example, features 16 Ohio artists whose music stretches from the lusty jams Wright gravitated toward as a teenager to those whose songs bear the weight of time and experience she can now more fully identify with as an engaged mother of three.

“With the teenage me, it was all about the crushes and love and the romance and heartbreak – moody teenage stuff,” said Wright, who then detailed how the music gained greater depth as she entered into adult relationships and experienced firsthand the things she had previously only heard songs. “Now at 40 and having lived and loved, it’s more personal. … And when I was looking for the performers, you have someone who’s kind of like a Chris Brown, who will be singing and dancing and a little bit spicy. And, okay, that was one section of my life. Then you’ll have someone who’s really soulful and who is standing [in place] singing about being a wife. And that touches on another part of life. It was fun to go through and pick people who have different ways of approaching [the music], because I’ve liked all of it at some point along the way.”

Founded as way to celebrate Ohio R&B in all its forms, the two-day affair includes the opening night music showcase as well as the first iteration of the Soul Dope Awards, which take place on Sunday and feature categories such as Best New Artist and Album of the Year, where musicians including Dani Ella, Zay Frost, Edwen and Charles Reed will square off for honors.

“I just felt like there wasn’t enough celebration of what was going on artistically here,” said Wright, who in addition to recording and performing her own music has spent the last decade-plus nurturing the local R&B and soul scenes, first with her Soul Dope Sunday open mic and later in booking Soul Sundays at Natalie’s Grandview. “The idea [with Soul Dope Sunday] was to bring all of those people together in one space. And I watched friendships born from that, and people who are still friends today. And that’s my plan with every event: to bring people together and to be able to create music in spaces we don’t always have.”

Describing the current Columbus R&B scene as “fragmented,” Wright allowed that a huge challenge at the moment is finding places to host events – particularly following a rash of post-Covid closings that shuttered once-nurturing spaces such as Lincoln Cafe and Burgerim.

Wright traced her desire to build community back through her bloodlines, recalling the sense of hospitality and connection fostered by her aunts and grandmothers and present in every family gathering. “There was always this love and this sharing of who we are and what we do, making people comfortable, letting them know that the way we’re receiving them is meaningful,” she said. “And that has spilled into my music and everything else I do. If you come [to one of my events] and you leave feeling good, you can thank my grandma.”

At the same time, Wright acknowledged that the pressures of fostering the scene have occasionally pulled her away from her own music, including an in-progress album that she intends to release next year, possibly as early as the spring. And so, following this weekend’s events, the singer plans to set everything else aside to focus on completing that record, which she said quite literally bears the scars of recent years owing to an early breakthrough case of Covid that nearly robbed her altogether of her voice.

“When I started getting back into the studio after healing from that, I could hear the texture in my voice, and it was almost spiritual,” she said. 

This more battle-hardened voice has proven to be an ideal vehicle for Wright’s more recent songs, which find the singer increasingly dropping her guard, recounting her experiences with a frankness that she believed to be lacking in her earliest songs. 

“You really gotta hurt to take a deeper turn. And around the pandemic, losing family members, and specifically my grandmother in 2020, it made me not even want to be an artist anymore. I didn’t want to do anything,” Wright said. “I was just that grief stricken and lost. And that really became a turning point for me where [the music] really changed into something else. … It was this idea that I was going to show people a little bit more, let you in a little bit deeper. And why not? I had just lost the most important person in my world. I have nothing else to lose. So, when you get my art, that’s what you’re getting now – the good, the bad and everything in between.”