In the YouTube video in which she announced her medical diagnosis and ensuing chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Zazu shaved her hair off, saying that it was a way to “celebrate this new chapter.”
The original diagnosis was cervical cancer caused by papillomavirus, or HPV, which then metastasized. In December 2016, she first publicly shared her diagnosis, which had come shortly after Those Darlins disbanded at the end of 2015. Zazu’s battle against cancer was widely chronicled, including in a long profile published in the weekly alternative Nashville Scene. Like her former bandmates in Those Darlins, Zazu used “Darlin” as a last name before the group broke up. Zazu and her original bandmates Nikki Kvarnes and Kelley Anderson formed Those Darlins in 2006 when Zazu was still a teenager - and their heated music acted as a forceful argument that straight-ahead country wasn’t the only style that Nashville had to offer. Nashville-based singer and songwriter Jessi Zazu, formerly of Those Darlins - or “wild one Jessi Darlin, the top singer and writer in a band where everybody sings and writes,” as Robert Christgau described her on NPR in 2011 - died at Centennial Hospital in Nashville on Tuesday afternoon following a public battle with cervical cancer. Jessi was more playful and ever-curious, a 21st-century female version of Jack conquering the beanstalk - always climbing higher, killing giants, enlarging her worldview. Small in stature, Jessi lived her message that creativity can make a person - especially a young woman - heroic, though she’d never use such a self-inflating term. As an integral part of Southern Girls Rock Camp, she devoted herself to convincing girls that they could talk about anything, through music and also through visual art, her other medium. She lifted up her peers and always welcomed newcomers.
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Zazu was a rock star in her hometown, but one completely free of attitude. As a songwriter, she grew up in front of her loving audience’s eyes: Her early Those Darlins songs are sass explosions pierced through with shards of insight, while later ones reveal a woman digging into herself, facing her own vulnerabilities aided by an increasingly sophisticated feminist consciousness. She loved the Carter Family and the Ronettes, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Rubber Soul. The band, which she formed as a teenager with Kelley Anderson, Nikki Kvarnes and Linwood Regensburg after receiving a hands-on education at the Southern Girls Rock Camp, lived up to the legacy Jessi embraced, of women who made unvarnished truth sparkle through the artful application of feedback and attitude. Those Darlins made three albums between 20 and became the noisy royals of the city’s underground. Years later, Jessi Zazu made more noise in Nashville than most of its rockers can even dream of. The indie rock band that she fronted from 2006 to 2016 called Those Darlins, was hugely popular for its unique style that mixed genres like garage rock and punk with bluegrass and country. She was going to play that guitar like ringing a bell.
Though she was the tiniest creature in her remarkable family of drawers, painters, players and all-around makers, Jessi knew she was destined to make a sound that was bigger than all of them. When Jessi Zazu was just a little girl, her mother Kathy says, she would wrap her fingers around the neck of a guitar and strain to play. And I just want everyone to know that I am a fighter and I never will give up.Septem– Jessi Zazu (Those Darlins) was born Jessi Zazu Wariner in Nashville Tennessee in 1989. And even if I don’t live, then I wasn’t supposed to live.
“I feel very good and feel like I am going to live. “I don’t feel very much fear at all, honestly,” she says in the video. There is also a You Caring campaign in her name that has nearly raised over $15,000 towards her medical expenses and cost of living. Though the next months will include extensive treatments, Wariner plans to continue to work on music and art, all while spreading the idea of “Ain’t Afraid,” which has now become a proclamation (Wariner has created shirts with the message, with profits supporting her treatment, that are available here). Yes, I guess I am a mystic mind after all.” In a sense: there’s a tumor growing on my body, I don’t know what lays in store, but I ain’t afraid anymore.
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I feel healthy, happy, hopeful, determined, positive, and full of sparks and nails. “This is typically what they would call a ‘no cure scenario,'” Wariner said in a statement, “but I refuse to believe that to be the case.