"Even if a fire hadn’t destroyed her flat in Boston, Sofia Goodman would have made her mark as. one of the most promising young drummers, composers, and bandleaders of our time. But it did, and if that had anything to do with the excellence that she has already achieved, well, let it burn. Goodman remembers the day well. “I was there when the fire started,” she says. “I only had time to run out with my cymbal bag, my snare drum, and my computer, just hoping for the best. It was like, ‘If I don’t die here, what are the things I’ll want to do?’ And what I wanted to do was to play music.”   

 

      At the time, affordable rent brought Goodman to Nashville to live with some friends where she could practice and play often. Goodman thought she would eventually move to New York. Despite its reputation as the center of country music, Nashville was also home base for a community of jazz artists. Their welcoming vibe and depth of talent persuaded her to stay. And it’s from their ranks that she assembled The Sofia Goodman Group, her platform for creation onstage and in studios. 

   

     Maybe that fire partially explains why water was Goodman’s inspiration for her second album, Secrets of the Shore. Thematically, Secrets of the Shore is a meditation on the mysteries of water. Recorded in Nashville and financed by a grant from Pathways To Jazz, Secrets of the Shore also documents the visionary and musical progress Goodman has made since her 2018 debut, Myriad of Flowers. Its textural motif supports the group’s alchemy of free improvisation and simmering yet soothing grooves. 

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     Nonetheless, Goodman’s first instrument was the piano. Equally important are her familial roots. She was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan to parents who’d met in college: a mother who is first-generation Puerto Rican American and a Nicaraguan father of Lebanese descent. She was placed with a Christian adoption agency, from which an Irish couple welcomed her into their home. Only recently has she begun to learn more about her birth family, a search that directly inspires parts of Secrets of the Shore. One piece, “Alberto’s Dreamland,” even features a recitation in Spanish by the half-brother she never knew while growing up, spoken over a backdrop of solo piano and whispering waves.   

 

      In high school, her music teacher, one of the only female graduates of her class at Berklee, arranged for her acceptance into a summer workshop taught at Berklee. Her instructor there was the soon-to-be-renowned bassist Esperanza Spalding. “At the time she was one of the youngest teachers who had ever taught there,” Goodman says. “She really encouraged me, even though I wasn’t a very good drummer at the time.” This inspired her to take private lessons with another faculty member, Jackie Santos. She eventually attended Berklee College of Music.  “I was known pretty much to live in the practice room,” she laughs. (She graduated with a degree in Drum Set Performance.)   

     

  She also became a regular at Wally’s Cafe Jazz Club, first as a listener and then as an occasional guest of the house band—a pivotal experience for her. By the time she’d settled in Nashville in 2012, she had cultivated her own distinctive sound as a drummer, grounded in a matched-grip technique more common in rock than jazz. She familiarized herself with Music City as she had at Wally’s, by sitting in with bands. She played with blues legend Bobby Rush and soul and R&B legend Latimore in Italy where her performance was reviewed as "Brilliant" by Tony Rounce of Ace Records. Finally, around 2016, she put her own group together and began booking it wherever she could, often in restaurants to provide background music. The more she worked, the more word of her prowess spread, to the point that she felt ready to shift from covering standards to performing her own material, a refocusing indicated by her changing the band’s name to The Sofia Goodman Group. Her line up has included Joel Frahm, Roland Barber, Pascal Le Boeuf and many other talented musicians.     Since then, the group has expanded its base beyond Music City. They’ve appeared at Alabama’s Alex City Jazz Festival, the Southern Miss Jazz & Blues Festival at the University of South Mississippi, the Kentucky Heritage Jazz Festival, the Elkhart Jazz Festival, and the West Georgia Jazz Festival, among others. Back home, the Nashville Music Industry Awards nominated the group for Best Jazz Album honors in 2018, then singled out Goodman as a nominee for Best Jazz Instrumentalist in 2020. Some how she found time to polish her writing chops by earning a Master’s degree from the Belmont University School of Music.   

     

Goodman’s journey has been long and eventful, with many milestones still ahead, including a project titled Receptive with mentorship from award-winning composer Pascal Le Boeuf thanks to the Chamber Music America Performance Plus Grant. Next, she wants to create another project wherein she plans to work with more women who are prominent performers in the jazz scene, while exploring her heritage musically. Her fuel thus far has been, as she puts it, “this idea of ‘I have to do this. This is the marker of success.’ But now I’m shifting into being open to whatever comes to me. I still love to write music and to practice my instrument; I’m just trying now to do both from a place of gratitude, because my sound is an absorption of everything that I’ve listened to and learned in my life. Which is how it should be."

 

-Bob Doershuck