Collected Blues: Dida Pelled on Time, Tone, and a Personal Vocabulary

The New York–based guitarist and singer on songs she’s carried with her, a direct, no-effects sound, and recent ensemble work—plus a full transcription of her interpretation of “Hesitation Blues.”

Photo by Dvir Kahlon

I’ve been thinking lately about how much I’ve enjoyed hearing musicians I’ve followed for years in new settings, especially alongside a younger generation of players. For me, the drummer and percussionist Kenny Wollesen has long been tied to a downtown New York lineage I was listening closely to years ago. Seeing him more recently with Julian Lage, I was struck by how easily he fit into a different context, without losing any of what drew me to his playing in the first place.

I came across Dida Pelled through that same orbit—Wollesen, along with bassist Tony Scherr—but what kept me listening was something more specific.

Pelled plays a 1970s Gibson Howard Roberts, straight into the amp, no effects. Her sound is clean and unforced, and it leaves very little to hide behind. Her time sits in a slightly elastic place, the phrasing feels conversational, and the lines tend toward what’s necessary rather than what’s possible. It’s understated, but after a few minutes you start to hear how much is going on.

She moved to New York at 20, studied at The New School, and worked her way into the club circuit. Over time, her music has widened to include blues, folk, and song-based material alongside a deep grounding in jazz. Projects like “The Lost Women of Song,” built around writers such as Connie Converse and Molly Drake, point to that broader curiosity, as does her weekly Radio Free Brooklyn program, “The Dida Show,” where she talks with musicians and follows those same threads of listening and influence. On her upcoming album, I Wish You Would (out May 1), she works with Wollesen, Scherr, and pianist Sullivan Fortner in a blues-centered setting that feels like a natural extension of what she’s been doing.

I recently spoke about with Pelled about her early listening, how her relationship to the blues developed over time, her approach to time and phrasing, and the process of arriving at a sound this direct. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Growing up in Tel Aviv, what did your listening world sound like before you found your way to jazz and blues?

When I was very young, I liked random stuff—Spice Girls and really shitty music that kids listen to—but I was a mega fan. My parents had a media company, like newspapers, so they could print things for me. They made me a business card, and on the back it said something like “Number One Spice Girls Fan in the World.” My dad used to travel a lot to America, and he always brought me Spice Girls stuff. I was like a collector. I was very invested in what I loved.

So I loved pop—Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls—and also hip-hop. I remember people made fun of me because I would memorize all the words to rap songs and know how to do the rap parts.

Then when I started playing guitar, around 11, I really loved Nirvana Unplugged. I played a lot of acoustic rock—Nirvana and also Israeli rock from the ’90s that I still love. Those were my first musical loves that I remember.

Then I went to a really amazing high school in Tel Aviv, Thelma Yellin. I don’t know if you know other Israeli musicians, but a lot of them probably went there. It has a great jazz department. There was an incredible teacher, Amit Golan, who passed away, and he taught jazz history in the first year.

I remember the first lesson—he said all these names, and it sounded like Chinese to me. Bud Powell, Sonny Clark, Erroll Garner, Kenny Dorham. Nothing made sense. It sounded really foreign. And then three months in, I couldn’t care about anything else but bebop. Every time my dad went to America, I would ask him to bring me CDs—Peter Bernstein, Grant Green.

So from 15 to 18, that was all I cared about. I loved that Grant Green double record with Sonny Clark. I loved Monk, the record with Monk and Coltrane, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery. I was obsessed. I think those were really meaningful years because I was practicing a lot and really trying to learn the language. And I feel like it served me until today—that’s my core.

But then at 18, I started singing. Secretly. I wanted to sing, and it came all of a sudden, like coming out of the closet. I was like, oh my god, I have to do this. But I was kind of shy, because I was already playing professional gigs on guitar, and it didn’t feel like my singing would be at that level.

So I took lessons with this weird voice teacher. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to voice lessons, but it can get really strange with all the exercises. He was extra strange.

For like two years, I secretly went to him. I started maybe calling one song at a gig. But when I moved to New York, for some reason I wasn’t scared anymore, because no one knew me. So I could just say, “Hey, I play guitar and sing,” and show up to gigs as that person, without having to tell my friends, “Now I’m also singing.”

And singing reconnected me to more music. I still loved jazz and learned standards and started singing them, but I also started singing Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Lou Reed. I remember calling those songs at gigs and kind of treating them as jazz—sing it, play a little solo, sing it out. And then I started messing with songwriting pretty early, too.

I Wish You Would came out of repertoire you’d been performing for years. At what point did you start to hear this particular collection of tunes as an album?

Those tunes were with me, I guess, since I moved to New York. I talked about the history of my taste, but when I moved to New York, I started diving more into blues—not consciously. I didn’t tell myself it was happening. Those things take time. It’s kind of instinct.

I started being drawn to more of that. I started going to Sunny’s every Wednesday—Smokey Hormel plays there—and I was like, oh my god, I love this Western swing repertoire. That’s kind of where something like I Wish You Would comes from—this bluesy, dancing kind of song you can imagine there, with people dancing.

Then I found Tony Scherr playing every Monday at the Living Room—just singing and playing guitar. That was the best thing in New York. A lot of musicians would show up just to see him. His playing and singing felt like Jimi Hendrix—the best thing you’ve ever seen—but bluesy, jazzy, also rock. So when I discovered that, I was like, oh my god, this is actually how I want to play and sing.

That influenced a lot. One of the songs on the record, “Trouble,” I learned from hearing Tony play it live. There’s not really a recording of it online. He learned it from Dakota Staton, who recorded it, and it was written by Gladys Shelley. I asked Tony to play it with me on the record, and we did a duo—he plays guitar and I sing.

So the repertoire came from just living in New York, finding different scenes, collecting things. At first I didn’t think of it as a record. I got distracted with other things—I started writing songs, making albums of original music, doing different projects.

Then I started playing at Ornithology. They gave me a residency, and I brought back a lot of these tunes that came from years of collecting. I also had a project called “The Lost Women of Song,” where I found songs written by women who never really had careers—like Connie Converse or Molly Drake, who was Nick Drake’s mother.

I would do shows with that material, tell whatever stories I could find, and play the songs. Some of those ended up on the record. Like “Rosa Mae” by Mary Lou Williams—I found a clip where she sings it at the end of an interview and learned the words from that.

So all these things came from different phases, and at Ornithology I started calling them because they were fun—for the band, for the audience. People could dance, or just connect. It felt easy, emotionally connecting.

And the way people responded made me feel like, actually, this makes sense to record. Before, I thought it was too easy for me—that I should make something more challenging or more original. But then I realized maybe the thing that’s easy for me is actually what works the most.

So I wanted to make an album that feels natural—just performance and interaction, making it sound like myself, not trying too hard. Meeting [producer] Matt Pierson helped a lot. He came to see me live many times and wanted to make the album that sounds like me in the most natural way. So that helped me decide.