Joanna Sternberg Is a Music Ninja

Joanna Sternberg, the musician and songwriter, grew up in Manhattan Plaza, a pair of apartment towers west of Times Square that are reserved mostly for performing artists. Sternberg, now thirty-one, and Sternberg’s parents lived, and still live together, in a two-bedroom on the fortieth floor.

Music was everywhere, in the building and in the blood. Two prominent jazz bassists lived down the hall, and Sternberg studied with both of them, while getting piano lessons, on twenty-six, from Margaret Pine, who taught Alicia Keys. (“She almost babysat me,” Sternberg said of Keys, who had given her number to Sternberg’s father, Michael, a musician himself.) Then, there were the forebears. Michael’s father, Harold, was a longtime basso with the Metropolitan Opera, who’d urged Joanna, sitting on his lap, to sing stanzas back to him. Grandma was Fraydele Oysher, the pioneering female cantor and star of Yiddish theatre, who often performed in the guise of a boy.

“Her parts were gender fluid,” Michael said recently. “She went by one name. Like Cher, or Madonna. Fraydele.”

Sternberg’s mother, Jackie, wondered if Fraydele might have been the inspiration for “Yentl.”

“She was sassy and mean, but funny,” Sternberg remembered.

More antecedents: Fraydele’s brother Moishe Oysher, the famous cantor and Yiddish-theatre actor; Michael’s sister, Marilyn Michaels, the singer, comic, and impressionist. (“If you’re gay, you know who she is,” Sternberg said.) Not to mention encounters with fellow Plaza tenants and visitors through the years: Tennessee Williams, at the market by the orange juice, in a full-length ermine, or Richard Burton, down in the health club, reclining on a chaise longue. A teen-age Joanna sitting in on bass with the Marsalises, in the East Wing of the White House.

“They let me play for like five seconds, but we got a picture,” Sternberg said. “I was the only girl, obviously.”

“As far as your parents are concerned, you played at the White House,” Michael said.

And yet somehow, as one sat with the Sternbergs in their living room, one perceived the mighty names not so much being dropped as hovering in the air—as friendly ghosts appreciating that Joanna, the sweet, eccentric prodigy on forty, had found a style and a voice of their own. (This is assuming that these ghosts had heard Sternberg’s new album, “I’ve Got Me,” out this week on Fat Possum Records.)

“I sound like a Muppet,” Joanna said.

“No,” Jackie said. She named a favorite song. “I have to brace myself when I hear it. The only other singer who does this to me is Frank Sinatra, and I don’t know him.”

Joanna gasped, then cackled. “Yes! All these compliments. I won’t need therapy anymore!”

Joanna—upbeat, considerate, nervous, humble, mirthful—wore a rust-colored T-shirt, tucked into jean shorts. Blundstones, bangs, tattooed forearms, skin itchy in the heat: “There’s a summer camp in the building. I went every summer until I was thirteen. I didn’t have friends from school, but I did have friends in the building, even if some of them wound up ditching me.”

“Aww,” Jackie said.

“I did not know then that I had autism. But I have autism and A.D.H.D.”

As to which years of school were the worst, Joanna said, “Middle school, high school, college—all of it.”

Switching from studying classical music to jazz, at the New School, gave Sternberg a way forward: “Classical was too scary. You have to be a ninja, basically.” Sternberg was soon lugging a double-bass on the subway to jazz gigs around town: “Then I spent a year in my room drawing comics and listening to music.” And then composing music that was more direct, more personal, than any they’d been playing.

Sternberg had warned a visitor about that room: “I’m a hoarder. It might smell.” But it wasn’t too bad. The bed was cluttered with clothes, drawings, cartoons, colored pens, and other stuff: “I push it all to the side and sort of . . . nest.” Sternberg teaches drawing and songwriting to kids in the building, and over the years has babysat for more than fifty neighbors.

Sternberg was preparing for a trip out West for some solo shows. They prefer to perform alone, and on the new album play all the instruments—cello, bass, violin, drums, guitar, piano: “I have too much anxiety about a band. It’s easier to do it alone.” There was anxiety, too, about encountering butterflies and moths (“If I see one, it’s over”) and procuring a guitar (“It’s too hard to travel with one”), but not too much about the performances themselves (“I have a way. I don’t look at the audience”).

Sternberg, who earlier had said, “I’m bad at making segues into big topics,” now said, “It’s time to address the elephant in the room.” Michael and Jackie seemed to hold their breath. Sternberg announced, “I’m obsessed with ‘Real Housewives.’ It became, during the pandemic, like, insert name of illegal drug here. I watch it every day.”

Michael and Jackie, out of fellowship, had tried to watch. But no. Sternberg said, “Either you get it or you don’t.” ♦