The spirits in Loa have a way of taking over an artist in the room. At the fifth session of Lilith in Loa, Zahria Sims allowed the spirits to grab hold of her and explore new heights in the space. "A world-class performance," the owner of International House Hotel, home to Loa, said of that Wednesday night. A multihyphenate musician, Zahria is as good on saxophone and piano as she is with her vocals, and she has a way of captivating an audience with experimental tones that reverberate through the room, bouncing off the mind of each person there and leaving you to question what you thought you knew about music.
There's a version of Laurel Canyon in that instinct — not the singer-songwriter solitude of it, but the other side, the sessions where a single musician would drift between instruments and collaborators in the same night, never quite finished exploring what one song could become. Zahria carries that same restlessness. She isn't content to just sing a song or just play one; she wants to build it from every angle she has access to, the way those Canyon musicians treated a song less as a finished object than as something you kept discovering.
Zahria Sims steps onto a stage with a saxophone that feels like it already knows the room. Raised in Baton Rouge, the daughter of gospel musicians, she grew up inside music the way most of us grow up inside a language — before she ever chose it, it had already chosen her. She carried that inheritance to Loyola University New Orleans, and out of it built The Zahria Sims Collective, a seven-piece band that moves fluidly between jazz, funk, soul, and R&B like they were never separate genres to begin with. She has shared stages with Kenny Garrett and Arturo Sandoval, and still, every note she plays sounds like it's being discovered for the first time. You can hear the influence of the greats in her music — artists like Herbie Hancock, Marquis Hill, and Cory Henry.
At Lilith in Loa, though, there was no seven-piece band behind her. Zahria didn't say a word before she started. She just stepped up alone — no band, just her and a small constellation of pedals at her feet — and the room went quiet on its own, the way it does when people sense they're about to watch someone build something from nothing.
She started at the piano, laying down a slow, circling phrase and looping it back into the pedals until it filled the room like it had always been there. Then she picked up the sax and played over her own foundation, answering herself in real time — a duet with a version of herself from thirty seconds ago. When she finally sang, her voice came in low and unpolished in the best way, threading through the loop she'd built until it was impossible to tell where the piano ended and the horn began and she began. Watching her work the pedals with her feet while her hands and voice went in three different directions was its own kind of performance — you weren't just hearing "Holding On," you were watching someone hold an entire song together by herself, live, without a net.
"Holding On" doesn't rush. It moves the way memory moves, circling back on itself, refusing to resolve too quickly. That's the whole heartbeat of the song: not the drama of losing something, but the quiet defiance of refusing to let it go. Hearing her layer every part of it herself made that defiance feel literal — like she was proving, in real time, that she didn't need anyone else in the room to hold the whole thing up.
At Loa, you could feel people stop checking their phones. Glasses stopped clinking. Somewhere in the middle, when she let the loop carry itself and just closed her eyes and sang over it, the whole room leaned forward at once, like they were trying to get closer to whatever she was holding onto. It's a different kind of quiet than a crowd falling silent out of politeness — this was a room that had stopped to actually watch someone build a song out of thin air, piece by piece, and hold every piece of it together at once.
By the time the last loop faded out, nobody moved right away. That's the tell of a performer who did more than sing a song — she assembled one, alone, in front of you, and made it look like the most natural thing in the world. The spirits of Loa got exactly what they came for.
This performance was the fifth in an ongoing series at Loa, with one final performance still to come: Saskia Walker.
