Three sublime recent performances got me lugging my Oxford English Dictionary from the shelf (with a thump) to look up "diva."
My copy of the OED, published in 1986, tells me the word is from the Italian for goddess, and refers to "a distinguished female singer." The secondary definition is prima donna, defined simply as an opera's leading lady.
My conclusion? We need to drop (with a thud) the misogynist idea that a diva is a demanding, egotistical or mercurial woman. That will allow us to properly honor divine women performers and leaders.
My diva list includes one woman who is not primarily a singer. Jenny Scheinman is a violinist I first saw perform in Denver with guitarist Bill Frisell in 2025. Earlier this year, she was back leading her own quintet, performing standards by the likes of Horace Silver as well as original compositions. The evening at Denver's Dazzle club included songs from Scheinman’s "All Species Parade," a suite she composed to celebrate the biodiversity of her native Pacific Northwest. The music of the suite struck me as painterly. I could almost see colors as I listened.
Scheinman is a commanding musician who has mastered both her instrument and the collaborative skills jazz demands.
I'm a jazz hound, but eager to be introduced to all kinds of music. In my hometown of Denver, it’s often the University of Denver's Newman Center Presents series that offers me a chance to hear something I haven’t experienced before. A few weeks after Scheinman’s set, I was at Newman Center for La Santa Cecilia. The Los Angeles band named for the patron saint of music (the first diva?) is inspired by such genres as cumbia, the rhythm of the African diaspora; rock; jazz; and klezmer.
La Santa Cecilia frontwoman Marisol Hernández has a voice as powerful as her charisma. Hernández, known on stage as La Marisoul, regaled her audience between songs with tales of playing in a punk rock band with her high school friends and singing Mexican folk songs on the streets of Los Angeles. She told us that she loved performing original songs (which includes odes to fashion and coffee, two of my favorite things), but also the traditional songs from across Latin America to which her audiences want to sing along. Unlike many people around me that night, I didn't know all the words. But I caught on to the infectious choruses and was soon singing as well. Hernández created an evening of community.
A day after rising from my velvet-covered Newman Center seat to dance and sing with La Santa Cecilia, I was in a much less padded seat at Swallow Hill Music, a Denver music teaching and presenting nonprofit. Family, friends and fans of the late Jill Sobule, a Denver-born singer-songwriter who built a career in New York and Los Angeles, had gathered for a tribute concert. Sobule died last year at the age of 66 in a house fire.
I was mostly familiar with Sobule because of her wistful rendition of "Sunrise, Sunset" on "Knitting on the Roof," a multi-artist, klezmer-infused album of Fiddler on the Roof covers released in 1999. More recently we heard Sobule live at Swallow Hill a few years ago during a Jews do Jews concert, part of a series honoring Jewish composers.
At her tribute concert, a dozen musicians who are veterans of the Jews do Jews series sang Sobule compositions ranging from lullabies to protest songs. The evening ended on a note of triumph for a multitalented, not mercurial, artist who will live on, as divas do, in her musical legacy.
The final song was her 2009 "A Good Life," which closes with a vivid evocation of the big one -- the quake that could someday destroy California:
I said boom boom, crash crash underneath the overpass
Burning buildings, flying glass, a good life
On the day the earth stood still, we won't have to pay our bills
As the mud slides down the hill, a good life
And we won't have to make our beds, break out the booze and like I said
Let's have a ball before we're dead, a good life
Let the pious rise above, we'll go down in our sweet love
It was a good, good life
It was divine to sing along.