Judith Hill takes center stage with family band and her powerful vocals

Feb. 23—Judith Hill has been bringing her powerful voice and eclectic fusion of soul and funk to cities all over the world, and she never has to tell her parents how a show went. That's because they're standing right behind her on stage.

Her dad, Robert "Pee Wee" Hill, plays the bass, and her mom, Michiko Hill, plays the keyboards in her backing band. For Hill, there's nothing like touring the world and sharing the experiences with her family.

"It's a special dynamic we have," says Hill, who plays the Lensic Performing Arts Center with her folks on Friday, February 23. "It's been really cool to be able to connect with different people all around the world and to bring the music and the funk and the soul everywhere we go."

The touring is the culmination of a life in music for Hill, who started playing piano as a youngster and later was featured in the Oscar Award-winning film 20 Feet From Stardom. She won a Grammy for her part in the soundtrack to that film, and her meteoric rise as an artist has been highlighted by stints working with both Michael Jackson and Prince.

In recent years, she says, she's focused her time on improving her electric guitar playing. Hill's latest album, Letters From a Black Widow, is primed for release on April 19, and she's been sprinkling songs from it into her set over the past few months.

"I'm just starting to roll out the new singles," she says. "We have been playing music from the last three albums and a collage of songs from the different eras."

details

Judith Hill

* 7:30 p.m. Friday, February 23

* Lensic Performing Arts Center

* 211 W. San Francisco Street

* $30-$55

* 505-988-1234; lensic.org

But Hill dispels a couple rumors started by her Wikipedia page. No, she cannot play the harp. And while she is comfortable speaking both French and Spanish, she wouldn't call herself fluent in either one.

But a lot of the remarkable tales in her biography are true. The cover of her 2015 debut album, Back In Time, is a picture of Hill as an adorable toddler sitting in front of a tiny piano. She says that is more or less when she began playing; her mom and dad were members of a funk group in Los Angeles, and her mom moonlighted as a piano teacher.

"We started very young," she says, "I was running around and soaking it all up."

Hill, who grew up in L.A., got her big break in the music business in 2009 when she was chosen as Jackson's duet partner for the song "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" during the rehearsals for his This Is It concert residency at O2 Arena in London.

Jackson died just days before he was scheduled to perform, and Hill paid tribute to him by singing the lead on "Heal the World" at his memorial service. Clad in a black dress, Hill stood center stage and sang while a group of children and music legends swayed behind her.

It wasn't the Jackson experience she had expected, but there was a silver lining: Her story was included in the 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom, which spotlighted the contributions of backup singers, and Hill was ushered into an illustrious sorority of singers that included Darlene Love and Merry Clayton.

The film won Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards in 2014, and Hill suddenly found herself on the A-list.

"It was an honor to be part of that storytelling, and it definitely opened up a lot of doors," she says. "I think the film was trying to show different generations and chapters of people in their careers as singers, and so for me, I was pretty new on the scene at the time. It was interesting to be part of that when I was trying to figure things out in my life at the time, but it's cool to see my progression."

Even before the film catapulted Hill to a Grammy Award, she was already in people's living rooms. She auditioned for the fourth season of The Voice in 2013 and made it past the blind audition, the battle round, and the knockout rounds into the top eight before she was eliminated. Singing on live television wasn't nerve-wracking; she says it was all the extra stuff that went into singing on live television that made The Voice so daunting.

"I loved dressing up and having high production value with the lighting and the staging and the choreography," she says. "I guess there is stress as you get further into the show and people start getting eliminated. It becomes more reality TV and less about the singing. ... I was more cast as the professional. I was sort of the villain. The girl next door is the one you always root for; I think they had portrayed me as the girl from Hollywood. Hollywood is never somebody you root for. It's my actual hometown, and it's an interesting place."

Shortly after The Voice and the Oscars, Hill had her brush with Prince. It started randomly when she mentioned to someone that she'd like to work with Prince. The next thing she knew, she was whisked to his studios and was making music with him. Her Back in Time album was recorded in just three weeks at Prince's Paisley Park. In a short span of time, Hill grew close with her musical role model, and before he died in 2016, he helped make her musical dreams come true by supporting her work.

"Prince liked to work quickly, and we usually just tracked things live," she says of making Back in Time. "It was a fast experience."

She just wishes they'd had more time.