For composer and jazz performer Lenora Helm, acknowledging the power that pervades a woman's life is not simply about permitting native ambition. It is, rather, about illuminating the singular and significant qualities women contribute to the world. Long regarded as the keepers of life's critical, but quiet continuum — carrying a child, motherhood, the family — women's live's, Helm concludes, have been humbly judged, with women themselves buying into a conspiracy of forced modesty. The result? No one really knows the legacy of a female life.

Helm wants to change all that with her new composition, Journeywoman, which traces the evolution of a woman's existence from death to birth using whipsawing African beats inside classical tropes. “I want to explore how women come to life at birth with full knowledge and power and while aging unlearn their divine nature,” she says.

Helm's awareness of her own power came from a pact she made with herself to ensure her parents “didn't die in vain.” Having grown up on the south side of Chicago in what she calls a “situation of lack,” she remembers vividly the exhaustion of her father as he worked to afford his daughter's choices. Committing to her music has been the outward manifestation of a larger commitment: asking herself what her passions are and being driven by that. “Men don't get asked if they can be a father and a musician,” she muses. “If women were allowed to be human first, they wouldn't wear the curse that keeps them from making powerful choices.”

While Journeywoman might be the result of Helm's personal pact, the promise of its power resides in the deal it strikes with all women: claiming the freedom and self-knowledge that are their birthrights.