Ina Carter was standing in her kitchen when she first heard the voice. Deep but feminine, it spilled down from the second floor of her Bronzeville house in a rough, powerful wave. It was a grown-up kind of voice, a voice to make you clap your hands and throw back your head. It belonged to her eight-year-old daughter, Mae Ya Ta’Nell Carter Ryan. She was singing a child’s nonsense tune—just a little song she’d made up about how her family loved her. And she was singing the hell out of it.
No one else in Mae Ya’s family sings, and Carter wasn’t sure at first how to get her daughter the instruction she needed. She called music schools, only to be told that Mae Ya was too young to take voice lessons, and that doing so would risk damaging her vocal cords. “I said, ‘That can’t be. There’s so many children that sing.’”
Mae Ya’s career got several big boosts last year. In January 2012, she received the Chicago Music Awards’ Emerging Star award (“I won against boys,” Mae Ya says gleefully). In August, her performance at South Shore Jazz Lives: Because Jazz Unites! (formerly the South Shore JazzFest) caught the attention of Chicago Tribune arts critic Howard Reich, who praised her “soulful utterances, graceful melodic embellishments and utterly natural phrasing” and called her voice “so deep, dark and alluring as to make practically everyone do a double take.”
“Sometimes it’s kind of scary,” Carter says. “It’s like, ‘Where’s all this leading to?’ The industry did something to Whitney Houston.” Carter doesn’t want to see that something happen to Mae Ya. With little knowledge of the entertainment business, she’s not certain how to help launch Mae Ya into the career she fiercely believes she deserves without exposing her to unsavory elements along the way. That’s why, so far, Mae Ya has no agent, lawyer, or publicist. Carter isn’t sure whom to trust.
Mae Ya’s talent and her mother’s support aren’t the only things pushing her forward, Maze adds—it’s also her own innate confidence. “It’s surprising, because she seems so shy,” Maze says. “But when she gets up to sing, I see her face, like: ‘All right. Get ready. Here it comes.’”
